Parisian Sketches Letters To The New York Tribune 1875 1876

944.36 J27p 57-15167--

James, Henry > <v ".

Parisian sketches* New
York University Press*
1957.

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KANSAS CITY, MO. PUBLIC LIBRARY

Henry James
PARISIAN SKETCHES

H K N R Y J A M M 8 , J K ,

HENRY JAMES

Parisian Sketches

LETTERS TO THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE
1875-1876

Edited with an Introduction by
LEON EDEL AND ILSE DUSOIR LIND

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

Washington Square

1957

1957 by New York University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress catalogue card number: 577914

Manufactured in the United States of America

PREFACE

Henry James's Paris letters to the New York Trib-
une of almost eighty years ago have been collected in
this volume for the first time. Three of the letters were
reprinted by James during his lifetime, the remainder
were allowed to linger in the crumbling newspaper files
in the hope that they would be forgotten. In recent
years extracts from those letters that were devoted to
the theater were included in Allan Wade's collection of
James's dramatic criticism, The Scenic Art; and cer-
tain passages dealing with paintings were incorporated
by John L. Sweeney in his compilation of Henry
James's art criticisms. The Pointer's Eye. The major-
ity of the letters, however, remained uncollected, and
available only to those who cared to read the files or
the microfilm record.

The documents contained in the appendix to this
volume were copied by Use Dusoir Lind in 1950 during
a search of the New York Herald Tribune archive car-
ried out with the kind permission of Mrs. Helen Rogers
Reid. They were subsequently used, with the permis-
sion of Mrs. Reid and of Mr. William James, in an
article published by Professor Lind in PMLA (De-
cember 1951, Vol. LXVI, No. 6, 886-910) entitled
"The Inadequate Vulgarity of Henry James." The edi-
tors of the present volume wish to renew their thanks
to Mrs. Reid and to Mr. James for having made this
material available, and to the Houghton Library and

V

Preface

the President and Fellows of Harvard College for Dr.
EdePs continued access to the James family papers.

The date of each of James's letters (in the date line)
is that of the writing of the letter and was so used on
publication. At the bottom of each letter we have in-
serted a second date, that of the issue of the Tribune
in which the letter appeared. Certain obvious typo-
graphical errors and other misprints have been cor-
rected.

I*. E.

CONTENTS

Preface v

Introduction ix

1. Paris Revisited 3

2. Paris As It Is 14

3. Versailles As It Is 23

4. Parisian Sketches 33

5. The Parisian Stage 44

6. Parisian Life 54

7. Parisian Topics 64

8. Paris in Election Time 74

9. Parisian Affairs 83

10. Parisian Topics 93

11. Art and Letters in Paris 104

12. Chartres Portrayed 115

13. Parisian Festivity 126

14. Art in France 136

15. Art in Paris 146

16. Parisian Topics 157

17. Parisian Topics 168

18. George Sand 178

19. Summer in France 188

20. A French Watering Place 198
Appendix: James-Reid Documents 209
Notes 229
Index 257

INTRODUCTION

In this book we have gathered together Henry
James's Paris letters to the New York Tribute of 1875
and 1876 his only newspaper writing during half a
century devoted to the art of literature. In later years
he contributed a few casual pieces to the London press,
but these were clearly the work of a famous man of
letters invited to say a few words in an unfamiliar
medium. His commitment to the Tribune was of quite
another character: he was young, he was confident, he
was energetic, he had virtually his whole career to
make. Moreover, he needed money, and he seems to
have reasoned that he would gain valuable experience ;
the narrator in one of his later tales suggests that "in
picking up things" for a newspaper, a writer "would
pick up life as well."

There were to be two further attempts, in the 1890's,
to write a certain kind of journalism, a series of "Lon-
don Letters" for Harper's Weekly and some "American
Letters" for Literature; but these, in reality, called for
the sort of magazine writing Henry James had done
from the time of his late adolescence. The Tribune
experience was unique not only in that it required
regularity of production as the "occasional correspond-
ent" of a big Manhattan daily, but in the consequences;
it was to have for certain of the novelist's later fiction.

* isc

Introduction

At the turn of the century, twenty-five years after his
Tribune work, the heroine of one of James's talcs rue-
fully confesses she has agreed to write some London
letters for a provincial paper: "I can't do them I
don't know how, and don't want to. I do them wrong,
and the people want such trash. Of course they'll sack
me." All of Henry James's feelings about his news-
paper experience may be discovered in these words,

As in his attempt to write for the theater, Henry
James approached his Tribime job with mixed feelings.
He wanted to succeed, but he had distinct misgivings
about American newspapers and the extent to which a
man of letters could work for them without compromis-
ing his art. If the United States had produced certain
authoritative organs, such as the Tribune, it had also
produced the fly-by-night sheets which Charles Dickens
had satirized in Martin Chuzzlewit. The time was to
come when Henry James himself would create "a re-
cording slobbering sheet," The Reverberator, and its
snooping correspondent, George Flack ; or the privacy-
invading Henrietta Stackpole; or the ubiquitous Mat-
thias Pardon, for whom "everything and everyone were
everyone's business." "One sketches one's age but im-
perfectly if one doesn't touch on that particular mat-
ter, the invasion, the impudence, and shamelessness of
the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring pub-
licity of life, the extinction of all sense between public
and private." Henry James was to write these words
in his notebook long after his Tribune phase. When he

oo

Introduction

turned to that newspaper originally, however, it was
because he esteemed it, and because it had been esteemed
in the James family. His father had been a friend of
Horace Greeley during the fight for Abolition, and had
sent long, un journalistic letters from Europe during
the family's wanderings abroad in the 1850's, which
the paper had published. Here was precedent enough
for his second son.

The novelist was to describe, forty years later, how
as a small boy he was taken by his father to the Trib-
une offices, "a wonderful world indeed with strange
steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying
bare-armed, bright-eyed men, and amid the agitation
clever, easy, kindly, jocular, partly undressed gentle-
men (it was always July or August) some of whom I
knew at home, taking it all as if it were the most natu-
ral place in the world." He remembered some of the
talk, too, among the newspaper people. One man spoke
of the French theater, of an actress, Madame Judith,
who was going to steal the laurels from the brow of
Rachel. And another told how he had just come back
from Chicago; the city was but a year or two old,
"with plank sidewalks when there were any, and holes
and humps where there were none, and shanties where
there were not big blocks, and everything where there
had yesterday been nothing." James wrote: "I became
aware of the Comfidie. I became aware of Chicago."
The newspaper was "big to me with the breath of great
vague connections."

Introduction

For the adult Henry James the connections were no
longer vague. He was acquainted with John Hay, who
had been one of Lincoln's secretaries and was now as-
sociated with the Tribune in various capacities that
ranged from reporter to editorial writer. To him Henry
first broached his idea that he might become a Paris
correspondent. The newspaper had been using a Pari-
sian chronicle written by Ars&ne Houssaye, a popular
devotee of the arts, who had served for a time as ad-
ministrator of the French national theater. He spe-
cialized in novelty and human interest; his letters re-
tailed gossip and miscellaneous impressions. But his
correspondence was written in French, and one of
Hay's jobs was to translate it. Henry James's letters
would have the advantage of being written directly
for publication; they would, moreover, reflect an
American, rather than French, point of view.

Hay had been from the first an admirer of Henry
James's work. He accordingly wrote a memorandum
to the Tribune's editor, Whitelaw Reid, informing him
of the proposal and adding that James "considers the
Tribune the only paper where business could be com-
bined with literary ambition." He went on:

I hope you will engage him instead of Houssaye. He will
write better letters than anybody you know his wonder-
ful style and keen observation of life and character. He
has no hesitation in saying that he can beat Houssaye on
his own ground, gossip and chronicle, and I agree with
him. Besides, his name is almost, if not quite, equally valu-
able and far more regarded by cultivated people.

ooii *

Introduction

Houssaye was receiving $30 for a "not very good let-
ter" requiring translation. Hay believed Henry would
"write you a much better letter and sign his name to
it" for $20 or $25.

"I think exceedingly well of Henry James," Reid
replied. "Go ahead and make the bargain with him."
The matter was promptly settled. A memorandum of
August 11, 1875, preserved in the Tribune letter books,
says : "Henry James Jr. is engaged to do Paris letters
in place of Houssaye at $20 gold, per letter, to begin
about 25th October, 1875. Wfhitelaw] R[eid]." It is
difficult to estimate in current terms what the gold
dollar was worth in the fluctuating currencies of the
then-young Third Republic, freshly emerged from the
Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. But we do
know that its purchasing power in Paris was consider-
able. By writing two letters a month, Henry James
would assure himself of ten gold dollars a week.

II

Henry James crossed the Atlantic that autumn as
he had planned, and took up his residence at No. 29
Rue de Luxembourg* It is now known as the Rue Cam-
bon and it runs from the grand boulevards, a short
distance from the Place de la Madeleine, to the Rue
de Rivoli The story of Henry James's year in Paris
has been only sketchily told ; but its principal outlines
are well known. The year was to throw its light far
along James's literary road. He met Turgenev, whom
he greatly admired, and was taken by the Russian to

(mi

Introduction

Flaubert's apartment, high up in the Rue du Faubourg
St. Honore where he encountered Zola, Daudet, Ed-
mond de Goncourt, and the as yet unpublished Mau-
passant. It is something to conjure with that an Amer-
ican writer in his early thirties, with his reputation still
to be made, found himself received in the Flaubertian
cenacle among the literary sons and grandsons of
Balzac.

Elsewhere in Paris James distracted himself by fre-
quenting the American "colony" that little group of
New World settlers which from far back has clung to
the entourage of the Arc de Triomphe and other fash-
ionable quarters of the Right Bank, He found it less
easy, inevitably, to gain access to French homes ; but
in the few to which he was invited, he again discovered
circles both literary and artistic. He settled rapidly
into a pleasant routine of writing and of social life,
with the Theatre Fran9ais always at hand to entertain
him when other amusements failed. Appropriately
enough, the novel he chose to write, at first destined for
the Galaxy but sold finally to William Dean Howells
for the Atlantic, dealt with an American in Paris. If
we place the story of Christopher Newman beside the
letters to the Tribune we can reconstruct the essential
outlines of Henry James's life and interests during his
winter in the French capital-

A journalist looking at James's mode of life would
say today that he had ample material at hand for the
Tribune. The newspaper was not relying upon James
for its French news coverage; for that it had the sea-

mv *

soned William H. Huntington, and for political stories
it could also call upon the services of John Paul- James
was free to deal with whatever struck his fancy in the
Parisian scene. A contemporary correspondent would
have found material enough in the smoke-filled Sunday
afternoons at Flaubert's, Turgenev's apartment in the
Rue de Douai, or even the quiet evenings at Auguste
LaugePs, where the American writer met Ernest Renan.
But James encountered these literary folk as a fellow
writer and not as a journalist, and he could hardly
make capital out of the advantage which he enjoyed.
In one or two of his Paris letters he does indeed guard-
edly allude to talk in literary circles which we can
recognize as originating at Flaubert's ; but the allusion
has been carefully depersonalized. Concerning Tur-
genev, whom he carefully described in his intimate let-
ters, he was wholly silent in his dispatches destined for
the public, save to allude to a portrait of him hung in
the Paris Salon a distinctly impersonal matter.

What was left for the Tribune once James excluded
his private experiences? There remained the theaters,
the art shows, the occasional book, the newspaper con-
troversies, and the human interest of the effervescent
political scene which has always then as now pro-
vided an endless source of color and rich debate for the
Initiated spectator in Paris. The truth was, however,
that Henry James did not know how to exploit this
material in a newspaper's columns ; he ended by giving
the Tribtwe largely the residue of his literary activi-
ties. And he found the writing of the letters irksome.

Introduction

His correspondence with his family discloses how
quickly he lost confidence in his capacity to give White-
law Reid what he had so bravely guaranteed. Less than
two weeks after dispatching his first Paris letter the
novelist wrote (on December 3, 1875) to his brother
William: "I can think of nothing to put into the Trib-
une: it is quite appalling. But I suppose it will come."
William replied: "Your first letter was a very good be-
ginning, though one sees that you are to a certain ex-
tent fishing for the proper tone or level," On December
20 the novelist wrote to his father: "I have written
three letters to the Tribune though I'm afraid the
first was a failure from excessive length and being
pitched in too vague and diffuse a key." On January
11, 1876, he told his mother he was "sickened" by the
headlines in his Tribune pieces. "I am glad my Tribune
letters amuse you," he wrote in turn to Howells. "They
are most impudently light-weighted, but that was part
of the bargain." By April he was thoroughly unhappy.
"The vulgarity and repulsiveness of the Tribune, when-
ever I see it, strikes me so violently that I feel tempted
to stop my letter," he told his father. "But I shall not,
though of late there has been a painful dearth of
topics to write about. But soon comes the Salon." He
continues to complain of the lack of subject matter. As
late as August, when the chore is at an end, he talks
to Reid of "the dearth of topics during the last two
or three weeks of my stay in Paris," and, as will be
seen, he went outside his Paris assignment to write
about Chartres and his stay at Etretat, lapsing from

atvi

Introduction

Parisian reportage into the familiar travel essay which
came to him with tolerable ease and in which he had
already proved himself. (These were the letters, the
pictures of Chartres, Rouen, fitretat, which he deemed
worthy later of rescuing from the newspaper files and
placing between the covers of his travel book, Portraits
of Places.)

Try as he might, Henry James could never speak
in his Tribune letters in the journalistic voice: it was
a distinct falsetto which he could not cultivate. The
voice we hear always is that of the artist and the artist-
critic and one who had made all the arts his province.
He had learned early that the arts are one, that the
human consciousness is the prime source of the artistic
process, that the act of creation calls upon the same
faculties of imagination and feeling whether it finds
expression in word, pigment, sound, or clay. When all
else failed him, and his Tribune pen lagged, he lapsed
into the use of his aesthetic faculties; he could also
fall back on his faithful eyes, his incomparable powers
of observation :

The huge towers of Notre Dame, rising with their blue-*
gray tone from the midst of the great mass round which
the river divides, the great Arc de Triomphe answering
them with equal majesty in the opposite distance, the
splendid continuous line of the Louvre between, and over
it all the charming coloring of Paris on certain days
the brightness, the pearly grays, the flicker of light, the
good taste, as it were, of the atmosphere all this is an
entertainment which even custom does not stale.

Introduction

"Entertainment 35 doubtless for the mind and imagina-
tion of Henry James, but what concern, we might won-
der, would a Tribune reader have with atmospheric
"good taste"? This is the painter at work, in blue-gray,
pearl gray, and flickering light, but distinctly not the
journalist, and we follow him as he enters Notre Dame
and listens to vespers and watches "the sounding nave
grow dusky and the yellow light turn pale on the east-
ern clerestory." The effect is charming and the scene
is beautifully imaged; indeed, we roam cheerfully
through Paris on this Christmas Day of 1875 in the
novelist's company picking up sights and colors, and
see them framed in delicate visual pictures. But as we
read, we seem almost to hear the groan of the Tribune
copyreader who must edit the column for persons seek-
ing in the Parisian letters what James later burlesqued
as "smatter and chatter." In the same way, when we
travel with the novelist to Versailles, and he is bent on
writing a political piece about France's reorganized
political institutions, we find him abridging his attend-
ance

in that musty little red and gold playhouse in which the
Assembly sits, for the sake of wandering about the ter-
races and avenues of the park. The day had that soft,
humid mildness of which, in spite of the inveteracy with
which you are assured here that every biting blast is "ex-
ceptional," and which consequently piles up your accumu-
lated conviction that it is the rule is really the keynote,
the fonds, as they say, of the Paris winter weather.

xviii

Introduction

We can indeed imagine what the copyreader might say
over the double-claused sentence, the quoted "excep-
tional," the fonds of the matter! But a few sentences
later the painter goes to work again :

The long, misty alleys and vistas were covered with a sort
of brown and violet bloom which a painter would have
loved to reproduce, but which a poor proser can only
think of and sigh. As it melts away in the fringe of the
gray treetops, or deepens in the recesses of the narrow-
ing avenues, it is the most charming thing in the world.
All the old Hebes and Floras and Neptunes there are
more to a square rod at Versailles than in any old garden
I know, and I know, thank heaven, a great many were
exposing their sallow nudities as if in compliment to the
clemency of the weather.

We have seen enough to understand what Henry
James's problems were in writing these letters. It must
be said, however, that if the Tribune reader accepted
the literary tone, the unorthodox journalistic sentences,
the substitution of color for fact, he found much to
reward him, over and above the descriptive felicities.
There is, for example, the little trip James makes to
Durand-RuePs gallery to see the exhibition of the early
impressionists, although he is still too rigid in his con-
cepts of what painting should be to appreciate the
revolution that these "refused" artists are bringing
about. He tours the Salon of 1876 with the patience
and vigor one requires in visiting this annual French
display of miles of painted canvas ; Taine, Renan, Zola,
Sainte-Beuve are mentioned, sometimes reviewed; we

Introduction

catch the novelist at a ball hearing Johann Strauss
conduct his waltzes; and on a certain occasion he is
present as Giuseppe Verdi leads his Requiem "with a
certain passionate manner." We walk through the then
brand-new Paris opera ; we muse over the traceries and
carvings of Chartres before Henry Adams has set his
studious eyes upon it; or we travel down the Seine to
Rouen looking at scenery, and finally we relax on the
beach at fitretat to enjoy the diving display of one of
the actresses of the Palais Royal.

The letters make rewarding reading if we can sur-
render ourselves to James's constant need to intcllec-
tualize and analyze experience. For the novelist is un-
able to be the simple reporter. He criticizes ; he reflects ;
he has a great many opinions. In sculpture he prefers
figures which represent "ideal beauty." The animal
statuary of Barye or the Carpeaux figures are too close
to reality. The nudes seem to shiver in the winter cold,
In painting, extremes of realism, such as Meissonier's
minutely-depicted battle of Eylau, also displease him.

The best thing, say, is a certain cuirassier, and in the
cuirassier the best thing is his clothes, and in his clothes
the best thing is his leather straps, and in his leather
straps the best thing is the buckles. This is the kind of
work you find yourself performing over the picture ; you
may go on indefinitely.

But he defends Decamps because "he shrinks from none
of the atmospheric mysteries and complexities * , ,
the great charm of art is in its being a change from

Introduction

life, and not a still narrower consciousness of it." He
reacts sharply to a morally ugly subject, such as the
prize picture of the spring salon of 1876 "Locusta
trying the effects of poisons before Nero." The pic-
tures for which he professes admiration by Flandrin,
Millet, Boldini, Decamps, Vollon, Chaplin, Munkascy
are those which take their subject directly from life,
which give an impression, a glimpse, frame a scene:
a landscape, peasants, fisherwomen, the charm of young
womanhood painted with elegance and grace, a strik-
ing portrait of a lady in a blue dress these are the
contemporary subjects to which he responds with
warmth. His lengthy comment on Munkascy's studio
interior, his preferred picture at the salon, is that "it
is the work of a man who stands completely outside it
and its superficial appeals." By "standing outside"
James means the capacity of the artist to detach him-
self from his subject, to see it aesthetically, and to have
(we can complete James's statement) "regarding its
texture and tone, a vision and a conviction" of his own.
James is affirming, at the core of his criticism in these
letters (and it applies to his reports on the dramatist's
art, and the actor's as well) , the need for the artist to
impose his own imaginative order upon his selected
materials. Ultimately this affirmation will form the
subject of one of his shortest and most suggestive tales,
"The Real Thing."

And yet it strikes one as strange that an artist who
spoke of "texture and tone," of "atmospheric mys-
teries and complexities," should have written with such

Introduction

discussing the Catholic education controversy; he is
stanchly for the French Republic even while finding
himself almost wholly in the company of monarchists ;
and at the same time he is fearful of Republican ex-
cesses and ignorances. He conveys a sense of shock
part of it is a sop to his readers over the representa-
tion of certain grosser realities in Zola. On the whole,
however, his views are mild and constructive; one has
the feeling of a man of even temper surveying life with
equanimity and a fundamental faith in the high de-
cencies and the future of civilization.

Ill

The history of Henry James's relations with the
Tribune can be briefly told. If James admitted to his
family in Cambridge that he was having difficulty put-
ting his letters together, he gave no inkling of this to
Whitelaw Reid. He is always his usual cool, business-
like, professional self in the correspondence with the
editor. The covering letter he sent with his first dis-
patch explained that "this is a thing which will have
to come little by little" and expressed the hope that
any headline prefixed to the letter would be "as brief
and simple as possible." (This accounts for the "label"
type of heading which was placed on James's letters.)
When later one of his columns blossomed into subhead-
ings, James promptly wrote a four-sentence letter
making a most "earnest and urgent request" that the
practice "be not continued." He added: "I object to
it in the strongest possible manner and I entreat and

ocociv

Introduction

beseech you to cause it to be suppressed. The thing is
in every way disagreeable to me."

Reid readily acquiesced. James was placated and
continued to send Reid two letters a month with con-
siderable punctuality. They ran from December into
July. As summer drew near, Reid inquired how long
James would be away from Paris and informed the
novelist that "some applications have been made for
Parisian correspondence, which we have denied at once,
preparing to have the benefit of your service as long
as we can." There was probably no special intention
on the part of the editor to suggest to Henry James
that substitutes for him were readily available, but the
next sentence might have caused the novelist to pause.
Reid told James that his letters had not aroused much
talk in other journals. He added, however, "I think
they have given a great deal of satisfaction to a large
majority of our readers." James replied that he was
glad of this but that his letters "could find an echo in
the other papers I never expected." And he announced
that he would be back in Paris in the autumn, quite
prepared to continue his arrangement with the Tribune.
It was at this moment, however, that Henry wrote to
his father about the "vulgarity and repulsiveness" of
the Tribime and said he felt "tempted to stop my
letter." x

x ln the columns of the Tribune during this period there
are letters of praise for most of the correspondents but none
for James, After Houssaye reappeared in the paper, writing
a Parisian column from time to time, a group of readers wrote

MOW

Introduction

was a wholly reasonable reply, it went beyond mere ne-
gotiation of an increase and touched James's profes-
sional problems. Reid, the brilliant reporter and editor,
only five years James's senior, was in reality telling
the novelist that however admirable literary culture
might be, it required a certain process of transforma-
tion to be acceptable in the columns of a newspaper.
His concluding remark had a peculiar and painful
force : freely translated it could mean only that James's
work had, in fact, not been good enough as journalism.
The novelist was left defenseless. He could hardly try
to convince Reid that he had indeed written good jour-
nalism or that what he had written, although It was
magazine work, was what the Tribune should take
from him. So, too, the terms offered no ground for
negotiation. He was to receive the same amount for less
work. But this "less" involved a significant change, an
invitation to be "newsy" more informative. A literary
hack, or a professional journalist, a man who fashions
his career by conforming to the needs of journals which
take their standards from the reading public, might be
addressed in this manner and would not think twice
about it; but was it fair to ask this of a literary artist
who offered his style, his reputation, his high individ-
uality? Reid's commitment as editor forced him to take
the journalist's point of view. James's dedication as
artist and professional man of letters determined his
reaction. The pen which answered Whitelaw Reid,
from the comfortable tower guest room of the Chateau

introduction

de Varennes, was perhaps more incisive than it had ever
been in writing for the Tribune.

James began mildly enough. He recognized that his
letters were considered by Reid not "the right sort of
thing for a newspaper." Indeed he said he had been ex-
pecting to hear this from the editor. He could easily
imagine that the general reader would not have time
for his letters during an election period. He was quite
prepared to grant that his writings would be more in
place in a magazine.

But I am afraid I can't assent to your proposal that I
should try and write otherwise. I know the sort of letter
you mean it is doubtless the proper sort of thing for
the Tribune to have. But I can't produce it I don't know
how and I couldn't learn how. It would cost me really
more trouble than to write as I have been doing (which
comes tolerably easy to me) and it would be poor economy
for me to try and become "newsy" and gossipy. I am too
finical a writer and I should be constantly becoming more
"literary" than is desirable. To resist this tendency would
be rowing upstream and would take much time and pains.
If my letters have been "too good" I am honestly afraid
that they are the poorest I can do, especially for the
money ! I had better, therefore, suspend them altogether.
I have enjoyed writing them, however, and if the Tribune
has not been the better for them I hope it has not been
too much the worse. I shall doubtless have sooner or later
a discreet successor.

What had begun as a gentle answer had ended in un-
concealed anger. And James's derisive 'they are the

atmx

Introduction

poorest I can do, especially for the money" suggests
that Reid's carefully chosen words, intended to distin-
guish between the quality of James's writing and its
usefulness In a newspaper, had wholly failed of effect.
To tell James that his work was "too good" was also to
tell him that he could not catch the pulse of the public.
Reid had offered the precise criticisms which William
James had repeatedly hammered at his brother : that he
was too analytical, too refined, super-subtle. The in-
tolerable irony was that all of Henry James's efforts
had been directed at achieving the very objectives Reid
held up for him, "brevity, variety, and topics of wide
interest. 53 He had tried to write about matters which
interested him, but without the certainty that they were
of interest to his audience; he had on occasion been
stilted in manner when he believed himself to be nat-
ural ; he had been subtle even when he thought he was
being obvious. Had he not, indeed, been trying to make
a sow's ear out of a silk purse?

Here the incident might be expected to close. In due
course James tired of Paris and moved to London. His
failure as a journalist may have contributed to his
Parisian ennui. If his siege of Paris was not going well,
he would lay siege to London. The British capital sur-
rendered quickly. Within two years Henry James was
a lion in Victorian society, the celebrated author of
"Daisy Miller," a writer whose works were in constant
demand in the magazines. The little unpleasantness
with the Tribune had been left far behind. When the

ococx

Introduction

novelist revisited the United States in 1881, bringing
with him his new renown as the author of The Portrait
of a Lct,dy> he dined with Whitelaw Reid in the latter's
New York home during Christmas week; and two years
later they exchanged friendly letters when Henry asked
to have certain of his old Tribune columns copied for
inclusion in one of his travel volumes.

IV

To arrive at the end of our story we must jump
across twenty years of Henry James's writing fame,
almost the entire period of his "middle years," to
January 5, 1895. On that evening a drizzly, unpleas-
ant London evening after a five-year attempt to win
a place in the theater, Henry James was brought face
to face with a hostile audience. His long-cherished
and carefully wrought Guy Domville, a handsomely
mounted play, was booed by a group of irritated and
unmannerly theatergoers. He seemed to accept the ver-
dict and he abandoned the drama. He wrote in his note-
book: "I take up my own old pen again the pen of
all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles."
Three weeks after the ordeal of the first night, we find
him writing (also in his notebook) the outline of a story
"The idea of the poor man, the artist, the man of
letters, who all his life is trying if only to get a living
to do something vulgar, to take the measure of the huge
fiat foot of the public." Was there not, he asked him-
self, a story in that?

Introduction

It is suggested to me really by all the little backward
memories of one's own frustrated ambition in particular
by its having just come to me how, already twenty years
ago, when I was in Paris writing letters to the N. Y.
Tribune, Whitelaw Reid wrote to me to ask me virtually
that to make 'em baser and paltrier, to make them . . .
vulgar. . . . Twenty years ago, and so it has ever been,
till the other night . . . the premiere of Guy Dorwtnlle.

Henry James's imagination played over such old and
still bitter memories in one of those intimate mono-
logues which make of his notebooks a fascinating rec-
ord of the creative process. He would trace the history
of "a charming little talent, charming artistic nature,"
the victim of the effort to "make, as it were, a sow's
ear out of a silk purse."

He tries and he tries and he does what he thinks is coarsest
and crudest. It's all of no use it's always "too subtle,"
always too fine never, never, vulgar enough. I had to
write to Whitelaw Reid that the sort of thing I had al-
ready tried hard to do for the Tribune was the very worst
I could do. I lost my place my letters weren't wanted.

For five months the idea lay dormant, but in June
1895 James returned to it, recapitulating: "It is the
old story of my letters to the N.Y.T. where I had to
write to Whitelaw R. that they 'were the worst I could
do for the money.' ... I lost that work, that
place. . . ." And so the tale of Ray Limbert was born,
the story of "The Next Time," in which the distin-
guished young novelist, writing for The Blackport

Introduction

Beacon, does "the worst he can do for the money. 35 It
was to be followed by others in the same pattern, such
as "The Papers" James's direct attack on newspaper
publicity in which the reporters also do "the worst we
can for the money," and by "Broken Wings, 5 ' whose
heroine avows, as we have seen, that in writing for The
Blackport Banner she is attempting something beyond
her talents. The light-giving beacon, the high-flying
banner, are associated in both "The Next Time 35 of
1895 and "Broken Wings" of 1900 with James's myth-
ical town of Blackport or shall we say with the black
forces of a press which, beneath its avowed aim of of-
fering public enlightenment, vulgarizes all that it
touches.

The notebook entries show that James had clearly
associated "my letters weren't wanted" with the play
which the public had so brutally told him it didn't
want. And into "The Next Time," written during 1895
and published in the Yellow Book, he wove his sense of
being a rejected author wrote it out with an easy
cheerfulness and mocking irony which cushioned inner
heartbreak. The little pathetic comedy touches the
eternal problem of the artist, aware of his gifts and
insights, who discovers the extent to which these serve
to cut him off from an insensitive world.

As always in these fables Henry James dramatizes
the situation by selecting high contrasts: there is the
novelist, Ray Limbert, who wants to write a crashing
best seller and succeeds in producing masterpiece after

- ocxtxm

Introduction

masterpiece which only a discriminating few appreci-
ate ; beside him James places the figure of a writer of
endless successes "the spoiled child of the booksellers"
who just once would like to be an "exquisite failure. 55
Jane Highmore, the prolific lady, argues that a success
is "as prosaic as a good dinner : there was nothing more
to be said about it than that you had had it." Mrs.
Highmore wants to treat herself, so successful has she
been, to "an hour of pure glory": she would like to
write a great book rather than a merely successful one.
Yet each of her novels outsells its predecessor, and
every work Ray Limbert writes trying all the while
to make it vulgar enough to earn him his bread and
butter ends as a glorious failure.

Thus the adequate and inadequate vulgarity are
placed into the scales. For a while Limbert works for
The Blackport Beacon. What follows Henry James
reproduced from life, without the changes his imagina-
tion usually wrought in his fictions. It was as if he had
just reread his correspondence with Whitelaw Reid.
The Beacon wants "something more chatty" from Lim-
bert, they ask him to make his columns gossipy, per-
sonal. "Why, that's just what his letters have been!"
the narrator exclaims. But apparently Limbert hasn't
stooped low enough. And he burns his bridges by echo-
ing Henry James's oft-repeated remark he has done
the very worst he can do for the money ! *

2 That James continued to see his relationship to journalism
in this manner is further indicated in an unpublished letter

OBtiDOGVO *

Introduction

In the remaining episodes of the story Limbert tries
to edit a magazine with the same fatal exquisiteness.
The circulation takes a plunge and he is again out on
the street, writing his unwanted novels and without the
means to support his wife and children. His serialized
The Major Key is "rather a great performance than a
great success." He dreams always that perhaps "the
next time" he will achieve the necessary vulgarity, the
vigorously sought lucrative commonplace. Meanwhile
the financial pressures bear down upon him.

Within doors and without Lambert's life was overhung by
an awful region that figured in his conversation, compre-
hensively and with unpremeditated art, as Upstairs. It
was Upstairs that the thunder gathered, that Mrs. Stan-
nace kept her accounts and her state, that Mrs. Limbert
had her babies and Her headaches, that the bells for ever
jangled at the maids, that everything imperative in short
took place everything that he had somehow, pen in hand,

written by him in 1897 shortly after he had ceased contrib-
uting his series of "London Letters" to Harper's Weekly.
To his journalist friend, W. Morton Fullerton he wrote:

"Journalism will have absolutely none of me. The Harpers
ten months ago asked me in a deluded hour for some 'London
letters' for their 'Weekly'; and I accepted, for the money,
which was considerable, and wrote some nine or ten monthly
ones. Or, they have just -written to me, dismissing me as you
scarce would an incompetent housemaid. And yet I tried to be
so Base! yes, yes your man is right. Be of a platitude;
nothing else will serve. Be as empty as a vacuum and as gen-
eral as an omnibus."

OCQCtfV

Introduction

to meet, to deal with and dispose of, in the little room on
the garden level.

But the "next time" never comes. Limbert writes
himself to death, the pen falls from his fingers without
his ever having achieved a modicum of the popularity
he needed in order to live; and Jane Highmore goes
her way still hoping for her "next time," when she will
write something that will be ignored by the multitude
and praised by the few. For her, too, the "next time"
will never come.

V

Today, almost a century after James's letters were
written to the Tribwie, they may be read not so much
for the ephemeral things they chronicled as for the
picture they offer us of a sensitive and discriminating
American, an American of large imagination, saunter-
ing through the very French scenes to which thousands
of his countrymen continue to flock. They can be read
equally for their vivid and lively prose ; they stem, after
all, from the same fertile pen which wrote the novels,
the criticism, the autobiographies. The Parisian
sketches may be too literary, too reflective, as journal-
ism, but they possess intelligence and suavity, they
speak for good manners, refined taste, high civilization.
The letters, and the stories which were an outcome of
them, raise certain fundamental issues: the function
of responsible journalism, the danger to privacy result-
ing from certain newspaper conditions and the deprav-
ity of public taste; the danger James was prophetic

Introduction

of the reporter who, under the banner of "freedom
of the press," considers himself free to peep through
every keyhole. In creating George Flack, James pre-
dicted a now all-too-familiar type. In inventing The
Reverberator, he not only documented for posterity a
certain kind of scandal sheet of his time, but foresaw
the advent of the twentieth-century tabloid. And in his
late stories of frustrated and misunderstood authors
"The Death of the Lion," "The Next Time," "The
Figure in the Carpet" he expressed much more than
his personal feeling that the finest things in art suffer
for want of fine appreciation. He seemed indeed to fore-
see that the artists of our century would be under pres-
sures similar to those which weighed on Limbert pres-
sures of the mass media asking the creative mind to
substitute the obvious for the subtle, the coarse for the
fine, the cliche for original utterance. In this way he
made universal what had been a private experience:
converted it into an artist's creed proclaiming the sov-
ereignty of style, the sacred uniqueness of the creative
consciousness.

LEON EDE:L

ILSE DUSOIR LIND

New York University

PARISIAN SKETCHES

PARIS REVISITED

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE I]ST PARIS THE AMERICAN

QUARTER THE NEW PLAY BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS

THE OPERA ROSSI IN "KEAN 55

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Nov. 22. I have often thought that some
very entertaining remarks might be made under the
title of "Paris Revisited" remarks that would find an
echo in many an American heart. The American who
comes to Paris for the first time receives, of course, a
multitude of agreeable impressions; he takes to the
French capital, generally speaking, as a duck to water,
and he is not slow in maturing his opportunities for
diversion. But no American, certainly, since Americans
were, has come to Paris but once, and it is when he re-
turns, hungrily, inevitably, fatally, that his sense of
Parisian things becomes supremely acute. In the inter-
val it may have faded and faltered, and tempted him
to fancy that distance was lending enchantment and
memory playing him a trick. Was it really so very
good as all that? Were the dinners at wherever you
Notes begin on page two hundred and twenty-nine.

3

Parisian Sketches

choose so unfathomably to the purpose ; were the shop
fronts in the Rue de la Paix so picturesquely irresistible ;
was there in the acting of Celine Chaumont x so infinite
a titillation? Our friend comes back with a standard,
with an ideal, and it is now his pleasure to see whether
the city o his predilection will keep her promises. It is
safe to say that, as a general thing, she does, and that
at those points where she is really strong she wears well.
You may not like Paris, and if you are not extremely
fond of her you will in all probability detest and abomi-
nate her. I have known admirable cases of both states
of mind, and the height of my ambition is to do im-
partial justice to each. But even if you don't like her
you must at any rate admit that there are certain
matters that she understands to perfection, and that if,
from necessity or from choice, one allows these things
to play a large part iii his life, one inevitably comes to
think that the problem of existence is solved more com-
fortably here than elsewhere. The French have always
flattered themselves that they have gone further in the
art of living, in what they call Ventente de la vie, than
any other people, and with certain restrictions the claim
is just. So far as a man lives in his senses and his tastes,
he certainly lives as well here as he can imagine doing ;
and so far as he lives by the short run, as it were, rather
than by the long, he is equally well off. They seem to
me to understand the "long run" much better in Eng-
land. There, if you live by the year, or by the semi-
decade, say, you are free to find yourself at all points
in relation with the world's best things. But the merit

Paris Revisited

of Paris is that you have not to look so far ahead, and
that without heavy machinery, by the day, by the
month, by the season, you are surpassingly comfort-
able. There is to be found here, in other words, a
greater amount of current well-being than elsewhere.
And if I spoke just now of a gentleman's senses and
tastes, it is that they are certainly a very respectable
class of phenomena. We most of us transact our moral
and spiritual affairs in our own country, and it is not
cynical to say that for most of us the transaction is
rather rapidly conducted. We wander about Europe
on a sensuous and esthetic basis eating good dinners^
rolling over smooth roads, served by sympathetic do-
mestics, staring at picturesque scenery, listening to
superior music, watching accomplished acting. We have
all our private joys and miseries, which demand a
greater or less amount of attention; but the average
American in Europe, traveler or resident, makes up
the substance of his life out of these things. Whether
he might not do better is a question I am not discussing ;
certain it is that these things are offered him in Paris
in a fashion which enables him to lay down his money
with one hand and take with the other in perfect se-
curity. His security puts him in good humor, and
though he has decidedly to lay down more money each
year than the last, he finds nothing to break the charm,
and mutilates an axiom which he considers philosophic,
to the effect that it is better to pay much for delights
than for disappointments.

This autumnal season, which is just coming to a

Parisian Sketches

close, is the time at which this appreciative alien may
be chiefly observed at his devotions. The numerous
Americans who have been spending the summer in Eu-
rope congregate doubly during September and October
upon the classic region, about a square mile in extent,
which is bounded on the south by the Rue de Eivoli and
on the north by the Rue Scribe, and of which the most
sacred spot is the corner of the Boulevard des Capu-
cines, which basks in the smile of the Grand Hotel. The
ladies, week after week, are treading the devious ways
of the great shops the Bon Marche, the Louvre, the
Compagnie Lyonnaise; the gentlemen are treading
other ways, sometimes also, doubtless, a trifle devious.
It has seemed to me, however, this year, that our com-
patriots are decidedly less numerous than usual, and
that on a walk from the new Opera 2 to the Palais Royal
one really hears almost as much French as American.
The explanation of the mystery, of course, is in the
fact that people at home "feel poorer," but the Ameri-
can idiom is dear to Parisian ears, and the sorrows of
Wall Street find an echo on the boulevards. 3 I don't
mean by this, of course, that the shops are perceptibly
shabby. Paris seems more than ever, superficially, a vast
fancy bazaar, a huge city of shop fronts. But it may
at least be hoped that if the autumnal scramble for
petticoats has been less frantic than usual, there have
been, in compensation, fewer cases of smiling perjury
over the counters and of hope deferred at the hotels.

Parisian affairs proper are just now rather quiet,
and there is nothing very noticeable going on. The

6

Paris Revisited

winter, and what for good or for ill the winter brings
with it, has hardly begun. When I speak of Paris I do
not include Versailles, where, as you know, the Assem-
bly has for some time been in session, busily arranging
the manner of its own demise, or rather of its resurrec-
tion. 4 The new electoral law has been exhaustively dis-
cussed, and it would seem that there is nothing left but
to put it manfully into practice. When this has been
peaceably and regularly done, and a new Assembly is
lawfully installed, the largest step yet will have been,
taken toward making the Republic seem a permanently
reasonable and comfortable state of things. In Paris
the first symptoms of the winter are to be looked for
at the theaters. Most of them are bringing out at this
time the pieces which they expect to carry them through
the next six months or through as many of them as
may be. The Fra^ais, as yet, has given only promises ;
but its promises cast the performances of the others in
the shade. The Theatre Fran^ais has in rehearsal a
piece by the younger Dumas/ and this constitutes, from
the Parisian point of view, a very great event. A coup
d'Stai by Marshal MacMahon, an invasion of France
by Prussia it would take something of that sort to
equal it. M. Dumas is a great favorite with the Figaro
newspaper, and the Figaro's compliments which is
saying a great deal are almost as ingenious as its
abuse. 6 Either in good humor or in bad it is, to my
sense, a most detestable sheet; but it certainly under-
stands in perfection the art of advertising a man. It
has kindled a crackling fire under the Etrwigere, and

- 7 -

Parisian Sketches

it will keep the pot boiling until the play is produced.
The greater part of the Figaro, the other day, was
taken up with an article of many columns about the
reading of the play to the actors. Of course the papers
could say very little that was definite, for the subject
was not to be deflowered. But everything that talking
without telling could do the Figaro achieved; it even
gave the names of the characters a piece of informa-
tion which, for Dumas' regular admirers, leaves infinite
pasture for the imagination. The French have a par-
ticular word for this sort of literary service ; they call
it to soigner an artist or his work to take care of them.
L'fttrangere is being very well taken care of. Victorian
Sardou T has hitherto been supposed, I believe, to enjoy
the supreme good fortune in the way of having his
plays talked about, and even quarreled about, before-
hand. But I believe Sardou has been accused of pulling
the wires himself, and this Alexandra Dumas neither
needs nor would condescend to do. Sardou, however, has
just produced very quietly at the Gymnase a long serio-
comic drama which is pronounced good, but not good
for Sardou. There would some day be something in-
teresting to say about this supremely skillful contriver
and arranger a man who, as" one may phrase it, has
more of the light and less of the heat of cleverness than
anyone else; and if F err Sol is still being played when
the day Comes round, it will serve as a text.

The new Opera is open, and to all appearance very
prosperous. There were many prophecies, I believe,
that so elaborate an establishment could never be a

Paris Revisited

paying enterprise, but the present fortune of the Opera
seems to be very positively confuting them. The winter
has not begun, the class of people who keep their opera
box as they keep their coupe has not returned to Paris,
and yet the magnificent house is magnificently full. On
the other hand, this is a season when strangers and
provincials are numerous, and everyone has to go at
least once to see the house. When the house has been seen,
it may be less crowded. The new Opera has been for
any time these six years the most obvious architectural
phenomenon in Paris, and this may seem rather a late
day for speaking of it; but now that the whole great
edifice stands complete, and that the regime that pro-
duced it has crumbled away around it, it has a sort of
significance and dignity which were not down in the
program. The Opera is already a historical monument ;
it resumes in visible, sensible shape what the Empire
proposed to itself to be, and it forms a kind of symbol
a very favorable one of the Empire's legacy to
France. There may be differences of opinion about the
beauty of the building ; to my sense it is in a high de-
gree picturesque and effective, but it is not beautiful;
but no one can deny that it is superbly characteristic ;
that it savors of its time ; that it tells the story of the
society that produced it. If this, as some people think,
is the prime duty of a great building, the Opera is an
incomparable success. It seems to me that a noble edi-
fice should say something to a community as well as of
it, and that unless, in both ways, it can speak agree-
ably, it had better hold its tongue. The outside of the

Parisian Sketches

Opera is, I repeat, however, an old story ; it is only the
great golden salle itself that is a current question. If
France is down in the world just now, there is some-
thing fine in seeing her make her protest, recover her
balance, where and how she can. It does it along a cer-
tain line just now at the Opera, where they are giving
the Hamlet of Ambroise Thomas, with Mme. Carvalho
and Faure. 8 It is the French genius alone that pays
the cost of the spectacle French architecture, French
painting, French music, French singers, and certainly,
in spite of Shakespeare, a French libretto. Ophelia, in
her madness, comes forth and delivers her rue and rose-
mary to the corps de 'ballet, M. Thomas' music is pon-
derous and monotonous, but nobler singing and acting
than Faure's and more artistic vocalization than Mme.
Carvalho's it would be impossible to find. The house
is perhaps a trifle disappointing a trifle less fabulous
and tremendous than one was encouraged to suppose
it. Reasonably viewed, it is superb and uninteresting.
It is nothing but gold gold upon gold; it has been
gilded till it is dark with gold. This is doubtless, from
the picturesque point of view, rather a fine effect for
a theater to produce. The really strong points at the
Opera are the staircase and the -foyer. The staircase is
light and brilliant, though I think a trifle vulgar ; an
immense affair of white marble, overlaid with pale
agates and alabasters, climbing in divergent arms and
crowned with a garish fresco of nymphs and muses, in
imitation (of all people in the world) of Luca Gior-
dano. 9 If the world were ever reduced to the dominion

10 *

Paris Revisited

of a single gorgeous potentate, the foyer would do very
well for his throne room. It is a most magnificent apart-
ment, and, like the auditorium, gilded all over a foot
thick a long golden corridor whose only reproach is
that it leads nowhere. It could lead to nothing grander
than itself. In the faraway ceiling, dimly and imper-
fectly through the dusky glow of gas and gilding, you
make out the great series of frescoes by M. Baudry. 10
They are very noble and beautiful, and the most inter-
esting things in the building. You manage to perceive
that much of this is exquisite, and you cannot help
feeling a certain admiration for a building which can
afford to consign such costly work to the reign of cob-
webs.

A month ago the shopwindows in New York were
filled with portraits of Ernesto Rossi, the Italian trage-
dian, 11 who was coming over to tread in the deep foot-
prints of Salvini or as he hoped, I suppose, to make
new ones of his own. You will have perceived by this
time that he has not arrived, though you may but im-
perfectly appreciate his motives for breaking his en-
gagement. He is having a quite extraordinary success
in Paris, and he remembers the adage about a bird in
the hand. On his way to embark for America he
stopped a night in Paris to play and the next morn-
ing he found himself famous. I am very sure that
his great part, Kean, would not have encountered in
America the prosperity it enjoys here, where it has
been played steadily for the last two weeks a great
triumph for a drama in a foreign tongue. Kecvn is

11

Parisian Sketches

the late Edmund Kean, the English tragedian, as por-
trayed by the late Alexandra Dumas. The part was
created by Frederic Lemaitre, and was one of his
most extraordinary achievements. 12 I listened to Rossi
the other night in company with an old gentleman of
a retrospective turn, who would let nothing pass with-
out assuring me that "Frederick" did it fifty times
better. But in spite of my neighbor I enjoyed Rossi
in spite of my neighbor and in spite of Kean. The play
is the most fantastic farrago of high-spirited nonsense
that even the impudent imagination of Alexandre
Dumas could offer as a picture of "insular" manners.
The first three quarters of the piece are mortally dull
(in the Italian version) , and Rossi is remarkable but
not exciting. But toward the end of the fourth act poor
Edmund Kean is represented as refusing to act his part
because he is in a passion of jealousy of George IV,
who is making love to his mistress. He rages up and
down his dressing room, and declines to go on, though
manager and prompter and dresser are all on their
knees to him. At last George IV comes In, and joins
in the suppliant chorus, but Kean laughs in his face,
and still keeps the house waiting. At last he is reminded
that the performance is for the benefit of a crippled
clown, who was his comrade in the days when he made
his living by turning somersaults at fairs, and at this
hint he collapses, wraps himself in the mantle of Ham-
let, and plunges into his part. In the next scene we see
him on the stage consorting with Ophelia, and fever-
ishly watching George IV in the house. This scene is

12

Paris Revisited

brief and rapid, but it is admirably played, and it de-
cides in a moment the actor's success. Kean, consumed
with jealousy, sees George IV enter the box of the
woman he loves, and from this moment he is less and
less in his part and more and more certain to fling it
aside and betray himself. At last he does so in a mag-
nificently grotesque explosion of wrath at the Prince
and sarcastic abuse of himself tumbler, clown, vile
histrion, Punchinello ! He rushes to the footlights and
pours out a volley of delirious bravado. "Punchinello?
so be it!" he cries, and he shoulders his princely
sword, like Punch's stick, and executes a sort of furious
mocking dance. It is horribly and yet most effectively
fantastic, and it makes nearly all the tumult in the
theater that the real scene might have made. Rossi will
doubtless do this quite as well in America, if he ever
gets there; but will it be as highly relished? I doubt it.
The Paris theater-going public seizes an artist's in-
tention with extraordinary alertness.

HENRY JAMES, JR-
December 11, 1875

13

PARIS AS IT IS

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

THE EXHIBITION OF BARYE ? S ANIMAL STATUARY THE

STORY OF THE SCULPTOR'S CAREER HIS TRIUMPH OVER

DIFFICULTIES EXCELLENCE OF HIS FIGURES CAR-

PEAUX ? S GROUPS AND BUSTS THE DECORATIONS OF THE

OD^ON THEATER

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Dec. 6. It seldom happens in Paris that
there is absolutely nothing taking place in the way of
an exhibition of pictures or of sculpture, though of
course the interest of the proffered works is not on
every occasion of the highest order. Ten days ago was
opened an exhibition to which the clever gentlemen
who do the feuilletons in the daily papers have all been
paying their compliments a collection of the bronzes
of the sculptor Barye, who died last spring at seventy-
nine years of age. 1 Barye was a specialist he produced
little else than wild beasts, in attitudes more or less
ferocious and voracious. But in this line he was a man
of genius, and his lions and tigers have an extraor-
dinary reality. They are familiar half the world over,

U

Paris As It Is

for he worked chiefly for the trade, and his models
were numerously reproduced on a small scale. To have
on one's mantel-shelf or one's library table one of
Barye's businesslike little lions diving into the entrails
of a jackal, or one of his consummate leopards licking
his fangs over a lacerated kid, has long been considered
the mark, I will not say of a refined, but at least of an
enterprising taste. Barye's early career was unsuccess-
ful ; year after year he knocked in vain at the door of
the Salon. His youth was spent in composing ineffec-
tual Cains and Abels, Josephs and Jacobs ; and it was
not till he was nearly forty that he struck his vein. In
1833 he exhibited his famous "Lion at Rest/' and be-
gan his fortune. Thus for the first time the unclean,
prowling, muscular beast of the jungles and deserts
made his entrance into sculpture; realism had begun
for everything else, and it was time it should begin for
him. The treatment of animals, in statuary, had always
been a compromise especially as regards the nobler
ones. They had always been more or less chimerical and
decorative, and the lion, in particular, had figured as
a sort of ingenious compound of the sphinx and the
poodle. But Barye came to his rescue with a good will
not inferior to that of Bottom the Weaver, in the play ;
he learned his secrets and represented him in all his
majesty, but in all his gluttony too. In his later years
the sculptor was appointed Professor of Drawing in the
Museum of Natural History, and the Jardin des
Plantes was allotted to him as his field of study and of
demonstration. The Jardin des Plantes was his Africa

- 15

Parisian Sketches

and his Asia. Though he spent half his life in modeling
wild beasts, he was a Parisian of Parisians, and he never
had the curiosity or the energy to take a look at the
veritable East. He perhaps felt the force of that truth
(which is by no means the paradox it seems) that for
artistic purposes there is such a thing as knowing too
much about your subject. There are doubtless many
matters in regard to which a little knowledge is a dan-
gerous thing ; but I should say that often, for the artist,
it is a great knowledge that is dangerous in the sense
that it crowds out inspiration and imagination. When
a writer or a painter says in answer to a request to make
a sketch of a certain place or person, "Oh! I can't; I
have been there too long ; I have seen him too often !"
he is talking purer reason than he may get credit for.
But this idea with regard to Barye is quite hypotheti-
cal, and it is certain that, within his chosen opportuni-
ties, he was a diligent and profound observer. He spent
most of his time at the Jardin des Plantes, and lived in
as familiar intercourse with his tawny models as the
intervention of an iron railing would allow. When he
wanted a background of wilderness he looked for it in
the forest of Fontainebleau. He was a painter as well
as a sculptor, and the walls of the exhibition of the
ficole des Beaux Arts are covered with small pictures
from his hand, in oils and water colors, representing
lions, tigers, and elephants, in the occasional grotesque-
ness of a state of nature. Some of them are lying on
their backs, kicking up their heels. The landscape in
these paintings, which are surprisingly humorous, is

16

Paris As It Is

always the oaks and bushes, the mossy glades and gran-
ite boulders of Fontainebleau. Barye had never come
before the world as a painter, and his brush does not
strike us as a particularly accomplished one. His color
is muddy, and his outline (singular to say, in a sculp-
tor) indefinite. That his amateurish attempts with, the
brush should have been deemed worthy of such exhaus-
tive exhibition, and that they should have been so seri-
ously noticed by the critics, proves what a standing
fund of curiosity there is in Paris upon all artistic
matters. For the rest, I confess, as well, the exhibition
slightly disappointed me. It is held in the great dusky
public hall of the ficole des Beaux Arts, which opens
upon the Seine, and the temperature and atmosphere
of this place, on these sleety December days, are not
conducive to dreamy contemplation. Barye's works,
with very few exceptions, are small, and, in the imper-
fect light, require a very close inspection. It must be
added that they generally repay it. He had caught in
perfection the expression of the more formidable mem-
bers of the feline race, and he renders it with incom-
parable certainty and vigor. He has represented them
in every possible attitude and manifestation of their
passions, and it is always the living, growling creature
that we see, with its infinite resources of sinuosity and
strength. As you look at these little bronzes of Barye,
so full as they are of compressed movement and science,
they seem to expand to the size of nature, and your eye
follows the beautiful lines of spine and muscle, and
loses itself in the softer places of the hide, as if the little

17 *

Parisian Sketches

scratches were real stripes and spots, and the fractions
of inches were feet. Everything in these creatures is ad-
mirable the moving, palpable curve of back and tail,
the strong, soft footfall, the irresistible sense of the
perfect mechanism within. But the best thing is the
heads and faces. Barye studied the leonine countenance
until it had no secrets for him, and he modeled it in all
its beautiful hideousnessl Some of his animals, throwing
back their heads from the carcass in their paws, while
they swallow a peculiarly tender morsel, have an ex-
traordinary truth to nature; you seem to see the flatten-
ing of the head, and the softening and contraction of
the yellow eyes, and to hear the comfortable snarl and
gurgle of the throat. Nothing in this way was too diffi-
cult for Barye to attempt ; like all real masters he rel-
ished difficulties, he loved them, and he triumphantly
solved the problem of impossible attitudes and incon-
ceivable combinations. One of his works is in this respect
prodigious ; the "Combat of the Centaur and the Lapi-
tha" is, perhaps, indeed, the strongest of his produc-
tions. The Lapitha is astride of the Centaur's back,
locking his flanks in his powerful knees, swinging a
club in his uplifted arm. The Centaur's torso is twisted
back with an admirable play of muscle, and he is fiercely
trying to unseat his enemy. The subject is magnificent,
and the author has handled the human element in it
with a skill which, for him, is quite exceptional. His
men and women, of whom there are several specimens,
are rather gross and unshaped; all his delicacy, gen-
erally speaking, is in his wild beasts. But here the man

18

Paris As It Is

is as good as the horse, and the monstrous rage of the
creature who finds that the combined resources of both
man and horse are helpless to assist him has a really
tragic expression. Though Barye was weak, outside o
his animals, he had once a conception which, if he had
been permitted to execute it, might have proved sub-
lime. It would have drawn half its sublimity, indeed,
from animal beauty. While the decoration of the Arc
de Triomphe was still unfinished (in 1840), it was sug-
gested to Barye to execute a group to be placed on the
summit. He proposed a gigantic eagle, of 70 feet from
wing to wing, lighting upon a colossal aggregation of
captured towns and trophies the eagle of victory
perched upon the spoils of conquest. I don't know how
it would have looked, but it sounds very fine. The plan
was not carried out, as it was thought rather imperti-
nent to the "conquered" nations whichever, in 1840,
they were. One thing more to be noticed is that the ex-
hibition at the ficole des Beaux Arts is (as I have seen
it well observed) an elaborate representation of cruelty.
All Barye's animals or almost all are tearing some-
thing to pieces, devouring, fighting, weltering in blood.
"The works of M. Barye, or the plastic beauty of feroc-
ity" that would have been a good name for the col-
lection. If I had known nothing of its history, and had
been asked to what period of art these beautiful little
bronzes belonged, I should have said that they were
made to amuse the ladies and gentlemen of the later
Roman empire, when they wished, in their houses, a
little memento of the entertainments of the circus.

19

Parisian Sketches

France lost a few weeks since another eminent sculp-
tor, whose funeral has just taken place at his native
city of Valenciennes after a rather ungraceful delay,
produced by the conflicting claims of his fellow citizens
and of his widow, from whom he had been separated,
and who is accused of having unduly neglected him
during the last months of his life. Carpeaux was made
famous by the extraordinary group of "La Danse,"
which he contributed to the decoration of the new
Opera. 2 Every visitor to Paris has gazed at it in min-
gled admiration and perplexity, and it is a work which,
so long as it stands there, will be sure to have gazers
enough. If the whole building is characteristic of its
time and place, Carpeaux's group is its most character-
istic feature. An exhibition of his works is, I believe,
already projected, and when it takes place I will speak
of him more fully. He had immense talent, and if to
seize and imprison in clay or marble the look of life and
motion is the finest part of an artist's skill, he was a
very great artist. The shop windows just now are full
of reproductions of his figures and busts. They are the
most modern things in all sculpture. That undressed
lady and gentleman who, as distinguished from the un-
consciously naked heroes and heroines of Greek art, are
the subjects of modern sculpture, have reached in Car-
peaux's hands their most curious development. In this
vicious winter weather of Paris, behind their clear glass
plates, they make the passer shiver; their poor, lean,
individualized bodies are pitifully real. And to make
the matter worse, they are always smiling smiling

20

Paris As It Is

that fixed, painful smile of hilarious statues. The smile
in marble was Carpeaux's specialty. Those who have
seen it have not forgotten the magnificent tipsy laugh
of the figures in the dancing group on the front of the
Opera ; you seem to hear it, as you pass, above the up-
roar of the street.

I may allude, while speaking of such matters, to a
species of exhibition which has just taken place at the
Odeon Theater 8 "Vkonnete et mcuwssade Odeon"
the respectable and dingy playhouse of the Latin quar-
ter. The dinginess of the Odeon has passed away; the
theater has been closed all the autumn for repairs and
embellishments. The other day it opened for the winter,
and the embellishments were found to include a foyer,
decorated with histrionic portraits and literary busts.
Several of these works are by distinguished hands, and
the theater for the last fortnight has been drawing
crowds for the sake of its entr'actes. There is of course
nothing so fine as Houdon's magnificent statue of Vol-
taire, 4 which thrones in the foyer of the Theatre Fran-
fais; but there are three or four interesting pieces.
Among the paintings there is a very fine portrait of
Geffroy, as Don Sallust, in Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias,
by Carolus-Duran, the author of that admirably rich
and simple portrait of the lady drawing off her glove,
which has lately been placed in the gallery of the Lux-
embourg. Carolus-Duran is of all the modern emulators
of Velasquez decidedly the most successful. His analogy
with the great Spaniard his blacks and grays, and
gravity of tone seems not, as they say of tomatoes, an

SI

Parisian Sketches

"acquired taste," but a natural sympathy. Among the
busts there is a very fine Victor Hugo, by Schonewerk
a trifle too sombre et fated but bringing out strongly
the extremely handsome character of his head. Then
there is an Alexandre Dumas the elder, by Chapu,
which is simply superb. It breathes and speaks. That
monstrous mixture of the Parisian and the African
which characterized his face is most vividly rendered.
It is a pity such a bust should have a name ; it ought
to stand there always, as a symbolic image of clever
impudence. The head of Madame Sand, by Carrier, is
less successful. She is muffled in a Spanish mantilla, of
which the lace is very elaborately wrought; but the
meager, imposing little visage surely does not belong
to the very positive author of L&lia and Consti^elo.

Mademoiselle Dejazet 5 has just died, and 150,000
people have followed her to the grave. She was seventy-
eight years of age, and she had acted almost uninter-
ruptedly from her fifth to her seventy-seventh year. It
was in its way a stupendous career. When she was a
child she played the parts of old women, and as a sep-
tuagenarian she represented giddy lads and lasses. She
has had the funeral of a crowned head ; there could not
be a better example of the ingrained Parisian passion
for all things theatrical than this enormous manifesta-
tion of homage to the memory of a little old lady who
was solely remarkable for the assurance with which she
wore trousers and sang free-and-easy songs.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
December 25, 1875

VERSAILLES AS IT IS

Letter 'from Henry James, Jr.

THE ELECTION OF SENATORS ALTERED ASPECT OF VER-
SAILLES PICTURESaUENESS OF THE PLACE THE PROS-
PECTS OF THE REPUBLIC M. TAINE ? S NEW BOOK

GLIMPSES OF THE OLD REGIME

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Dec. 16. There is only one thing talked
about just now in Paris the election of the 75 per-
manent senators. 1 The elective process has been going
on for upward of a week, and turning out an average
of 10 names a day; a day or two more will complete
the list. In the evening, on the boulevards, at the
theaters, in the cafes, the Soir, the paper which comes
out at nine o'clock, is pounced upon with extraordinary
avidity. You will some time since have received full
news of the reiterated, and in its effect really very dra-
matic, victory of the Left, and I have moreover no
warrant to examine the political aspect of the question.
But such questions have in Europe, more than with us,
a picturesque aspect as well, and of this latter, in the
present case, I had a glimpse the other day, which I

Parisian Sketches

found sufficiently entertaining. It was the first day of
the voting for the senators at the Assembly ; and I re-
paired to Versailles, invoking as discreetly as a for-
eigner may in such a matter, good fortune upon the
Republican councils. It is very possible that the pro-
ceedings in the Assembly might not have been found
especially striking by an observer who insists always
on very novel and acute sensations ; but certainly, tak-
ing one thing with another, I deemed my afternoon de-
cidedly remunerative. There is entertainment enough,
of a mild, misty winter day, in strolling about that
stately solitude of Versailles. Now that the French
legislative body is permanently established there the
new Senate Chamber has just been constructed, with
extraordinary celerity the melancholy of the place is
a little less intolerable than formerly, and you may go
and enjoy its fine historic flavor with comfortable
equanimity. I have just been reading the first install-
ment of the new work by M. Tame, 2 lately so attentively
expected Les Origincs de la France Contemporaine
in which he sets forth with his usual vividness and vigor
the prodigious wastefulness of the manners and customs
introduced by Louis XIV. His pompous architecture
swallowed up millions of treasure, but in view of the
excellent use to which it is now being put we may al-
most absolve him. Versailles seems to have been made
on purpose to offer a haven of security to a Parliament
situated as the French Assembly is a Parliament for
which the "emotional" character of the population ren-
ders the national capital an unsafe abode. Its stillness

24 '

Versailles As It Is

and spaciousness, its air of decency and dignity, all
seem a guarantee of undisturbed deliberations. It had
never appeared to me before to have so much of this
drowsy majesty. I had always been there in summer,
when the fountains were playing, the avenues green,
and the long polished floors of the gilded halls dotted
with Paris holiday-takers or American tourists look-
ing like flies on horizontal mirrors. But all deserted
palaces and gardens should be seen in the chill and
leafless season. Then nature seems to give them up to
your sympathy and they appear to take you into their
confidence. I abridged my attendance in that musty
little red and gold playhouse in which the Assembly
sits, for the sake of wandering about the terraces and
avenues of the park. The day had that soft, humid
mildness of which, in spite of the inveteracy with which
you are assured here that every biting blast is "excep-
tional," and which consequently piles up your accu-
mulated conviction that it is the rule is really the
keynote, the fonds, as they say, of the Paris winter
weather. The long, misty alleys and vistas were cov-
ered with a sort of brown and violet bloom which a
painter would have loved to reproduce, but which a
poor proser can only think of and sigh. As it melts
away in the fringe of the gray treetops, or deepens in
the recesses of the narrowing avenues, it is the most
charming thing in the world. All the old Hebes and
Floras and Neptunes there are more to a square rod
at Versailles than in any old garden I know, and I know,
thank heaven, a great many were exposing their sal-

- eg

Parisian Sketches

low nudities as if in compliment to the clemency of the
weather. There is nowhere else, surely, such a redun-
dancy of more or less chiseled marble ; it is a forest of
statues, as well as of trees. My only complaint against
this moldy mythology, however, is that it is kept in a
trifle too good repair; like everything else in France,
it is carefully administr. There are none of those ab-
sent arms and diminished bosoms which are so abun-
dant in Italy, and which seem to place one in communi-
cation with those departed generations in recovery of
whose familiar caresses one may fancy them to have
crumbled away. On one of the great shallow basins of
the fountains a handful of people were trying to skate
on some very sloppy ice; everyone, I noticed, was in
the primary stages of skill. If there is any amusement,
however abortive, to be picked up here, it is wonderful
how many persons seem to have been eagerly waiting
for it. I was surprised, nevertheless, at the skaters at
Versailles floundering about so gracefully. To learn to
skate requires, of all things, continuity of practice, and
that must be rare where the winter is, according to an
excellent expression, not "frank." In some of the great
avenues, where the clumsy old coaches of the Bourbons
used to roll, the little red-legged soldiers of the present
Republic were learning their manual. Their corporals
were at them, and smiting their muskets into the
proper attitudes; but in spite of all the ugly things
that lie behind it, the spectacle looked cheerful enough
in the watery sunshine. Here and there, in open places,
a couple of panting conscripts were learning to do the

Versailles As It Is

bugle call. The bugleman was inarching them off their
legs and giving them "patterns" to copy by, like the
flourishes of a writing master. The poor fellows were
stumping along under his nose, purple in the face with
their exertions, and their repetition of the airs he had
given had, indeed, as many square corners as a school-
boy's flourishes. But in the soft, impartial echo that
melted away through the park, it seemed to me that
their notes sounded as well as his own.

One regards the present Assembly with an increase of
interest now that it is about to become historical. As I
looked down upon the 500 not particularly handsome
or individually impressive gentlemen who were chat-
ting and edging their way about in the pit of the little
rococo theater, it was impossible not to philosophize a
trifle. A great many foolish things have been said there,
but one excellent thing has been done. The Republic
has been kept along; the silver cord has not been al-
lowed altogether to loose. By hook and by crook,
through thick and thin, by something that seemed at
times like a clumsy accident, the Republic has been
weaned from babyhood and set on its feet. There are
plenty of people who promise you it can't walk alone
that it will tumble over and crack its pate. But these
are no true friends of the family. The wisest of the
doctors and nurses declare that if it is given a chance
it will toddle ; and now, fortunately, every year its legs
are growing longer. In the very place where the mon-
archs of the last century, as they looked about them at
a court that ventured to laugh at honest Moli&re only

Parisian Sketches

when they had given the permissive smile, must have
felt peculiarly and transcendently monarchical be-
neath that great gilded angel above the proscenium,
straddling upon her wrinkled silver cloud and clasp-
ing the lilied shield of the Bourbons under these in-
congruous circumstances the work has been done. The
Assembly has been accused of dragging on its existence
longer than was needful for selfish ends, but among
these personal joys that of sitting in the Versailles
Theater (I allude to the simple physical act) cannot
be counted. Never were Deputies more uncomfortable.
Seven hundred men are packed into a space none too
large to accommodate 300; their benches are hardly
more ample than the top rail of a fence, and their desks
are about the capacity of the book rack in a church pew.
As the most significant doings are generally the sim-
plest, there is nothing in what I saw in the Assembly
that especially invites narration. Seven hundred gen-
tlemen filed slowly before the tribune and dropped a
ballot into an urn. It was a good chance to make a
study of the multitudinous types of the French physi-
ognomy, and I endeavored to profit by my opportunity,
but one's shorthand notes on such an occasion are
rather hard to transcribe.

I just now mentioned M, Taine's new book, which is
the literary event of the day, and is very well worth
speaking of. The history of the French Revolution,
upon which he has so long been engaged, proves to be a
work of the somewhat larger scope, which the title I
quoted above would indicate. The first volume, a stout

Versailles As It Is

octavo of 550 pages, came out two or three days since;
it is devoted to the "Ancien Regime." M. Taine has
been so much translated that he has now, to English
eyes, a tolerably distinct physiognomy. With the ex-
ception of M. Renan, he is now the most brilliant
French writer, albeit that he is not in the Academy.
But in truth, with his extraordinary store of general
knowledge and his magnificent skill in that office, which
is considered the peculiar function of academies
presentation, exhibition, harmonious arrangement M.
Taine is an academy in himself. He is very far from
infallible, and so are academies ; but like them, right or
wrong, he always speaks with a certain accumulated au-
thority. I speak of him advisedly as a "writer," for
although he is also a logician, a metaphysician, a
thinker, and a scholar, it is the literary quality of his
genius that I most highly relish. I suspect, moreover,
that it is the side that he most relishes himself, and
that, on the whole, it is the most valuable side. Some of
his theories have been severely riddled by criticism, but
at the worst he is capital reading. His style in his pres-
ent work flows in as ample a current as ever ; one sees
that it has been fed from many sources. His theories
here, moreover, are not obtrusive. His work has been
chiefly one of narration and exposition. He has given
a complete picture of the structure and condition of
the French society that preceded the Revolution its
organization, its habits, its occupations, its public and
private economy, its diet, its costume, its temper, its
ideas, its ways of feeling. The picture is extraordinarily

29 *

Parisian Sketches

complete, and is executed with that sustained vigor of
which M. Taine only is capable. The eighteenth cen-
tury in French literature has been turned inside out,
sifted and resif ted, explored in its minutest detail ; but
the thing has never been done with the method and
energy of M. Taine; there is no other such rich and
vivid resume. He has disinterred new facts, possessed
himself of new documents, illuminated a variety of
points with a stronger light, and made a most interest-
ing book. It is amazing how well we have come to know
the eighteenth century ; there was never such a labor of
revivification. The defunct is standing upon his feet
again ; he wears his clothes as he used to put them on
himself, and his wig as his valet used to powder it ; he
has the cares of life in his cheeks and the look of sym-
pathy in his eyes ; not a wrinkle on his brow, not a de-
tail of his costume is wanting ; he can almost speak, or
if he cannot speak he easily can listen. If he listens to
M. Taine he will hear some painful truths. M. Taine
is supposed to intend to take a reactionary view of the
French Revolution, and to devote himself chiefly to
that somewhat neglected province of history, the injury
it did to France. It is high time, certainly, that this
work were done, from the liberal and philosophical
standpoint. In this volume, however, the author is by
no means reactionary ; a more damning indictment than
his picture of the social orders that the Revolution
swept away cannot be imagined* The criticism of what
it in turn established will come later. The book is a
curious mine of facts about the old royal and aristo-

30 -

Versailles As It Is

cratic habits about the expenditure of the court and
of those who frequented it. I had marked a great many
passages for quotation. Page after page is filled with
accounts of the sinecures under Louis XIV and Louis
XV. Gentlemen and ladies drew ten and twenty thou-
sand francs a year for performing functions which had
not even a name, and others for performing func-
tions which had names which we do not pronounce
in English (they do in French), though the functions
themselves were strictly nominal. The analysis of the
temper and intellectual condition of society is as com-
plete as might have been expected from so keen a psy-
chologist as M. Taine. This is accompanied by a great
many characteristic anecdotes. Louis XIV loved to
centralize ; he wished the whole aristocracy to be per-
petually at court, paying him its respects. He was
therefore much gratified, I suppose, when a certain
M. de Vardes (the name deserves to be preserved) re-
marked to him that, "When one is away from your
Majesty, one is not only unhappy; one is ridiculous."
One might be ridiculous, it appears, even within speak-
ing distance of his Majesty. M. Taine speaks of course
of the reign of "sensibility" which set in about the
middle of the last century and continued during the
Revolution, without the least detriment to that of Ter-
ror. It produced a great deal of vaporous sentimental-
ity, but it sometimes gave a very delicate point to the
feelings. "We meet thus," says our author, "with ac-
tions and expressions of a supreme grace, unique of
their kind, like some tiny little masterpiece in Sevres

Parisian Sketches

china." One day when the Countess Am61ie de Bouffiers
was speaking rather lightly of her husband, her mother-
in-law said, "You forget that you are speaking of my
son." "It is true," she answered, "I thought I was speak-
ing only of your son-in-law." The virtuous and temper-
ate Madame Elizabeth had sixty thousand dollars al-
lowed her annually for her food. There was doubtless
a good deal of reason in Talleyrand's saying that "He
who had not lived before 1789 did not know the sweet-
ness of living." There was another point of view, how-
ever: the last division of M. Taine's volume, and the
most interesting, is on the people. But the whole book is
to be read.

H. JAMES, JR.
January 8, 1876

4

PARISIAN SKETCHES

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

MEISSONIER'S "BATTLE OF FRIEDLAND" PURCHASE OF
THE PICTURE BY MR. A. T. STEWART MERITS AND DE-
MERITS OF THE WORK THE HOLIDAYS IN PARIS PIC-

TURESQXTENESS OF THE CITY AT EVENTIDE

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Dec. 28. There has been much notice taken
during the last fortnight of a new picture by Meis-
sonier, which has been on exhibition first at the rooms
of an eminent dealer, and then at the Club des Mir-
litons. Any new work by M. Meissonier 1 is of course
noticeable, but the present one has a special claim to
distinction in the fact that it is the largest picture
that has ever proceeded from the hand of that prince
of miniaturists. Besides, as the future possessors of
it, you should know something about it. The pic-
ture has been bought by Mr. A. T. Stewart 2 of
New York for the prodigious sum, as I see it af-
firmed, of 380,000 francs. The thing is exceedingly
clever, but it strikes me as the dearest piece of goods I
have ever had the honor of contemplating. It has, I be-

S3

Parisian SketcJies

lieve, what they call in France its "legend" that little
nebulous body of anecdote which hovers, like the tail of
a comet, in the rear of every nine days' wonder. The
picture was seen in an embryonic condition by Sir
Richard Wallace, 8 and purchased in anticipation for
200,000 francs one half of which was deposited as a
pledge in the hands of the dealer. But time elapsed,
and Sir Richard Wallace thought better of his bar-
gain; he took hack his offer and his $20,000. Mean-
while the picture was completed, and the price also. It
was offered to Mr. Stewart for $60,000. He accepted,
but this was not all. The dealer bethought himself
that this small parallelogram of canvas would pay
a duty of $8,000 at the New York Custom House,
and he accordingly annexed this trifle to the bill of
sale. Then it appeared that M. Meissonier desired to
retain the right to exhibit the picture in the Salon
of next year, and that the cost of bringing it back
across the seas for this purpose would be a matter
of $8,000 more. Why it should cost so much to trans-
port a deal box containing a light canvas from New
York to Paris is not immediately apparent. It occupies
less space than the most emaciated human being, and it
eats nothing. But the fare of the picture was super-
added to the amount already mentioned, and the Amer-
ican purchaser laid down without flinching always ac-
cording to the "legend" the round sum of 380,000
francs. The picture represents an immense amount of
labor, and of acquired science and skill, and one takes,
moreover, an acute satisfaction in seeing America stretch

Parisian Sketches

out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth
of the wide Atlantic, the highest prizes of the game of
civilization. And yet, in spite of these reflections, M.
Meissonier's little picture seemed to me dear, as I have
said, at $76,000. It must be added, however, that in
dealing with so high a talent as Meissonier's, it is very
hard to fix the line of division between the fair value
and the factitious value. The ability is so extreme, so
consummate, so defiant of analysis, that it carries off
with an irresistible assurance any claims it may choose
to make. To paint so well as that, you say as you stand
and look, must be so difficult, must be impossible to
anyone but Meissonier; and if Meissonier is unique,
why should he not command the prices of unique
things? If there were only one sewing machine in the
world, for instance, who can say what might be the
pecuniary conditions annexed to its changing hands?
And then I humbly confess that if a certain number of
persons have been found to agree that such and such
an enormous sum is a proper valuation of a picture, a
book, or a song at a concert, it is very hard not to be
rather touched with awe and to see a certain golden
refl#t in the performance. Indeed, if you do not see it,
the object in question becomes perhaps still more im-
pressive a something too elevated and exquisite for
your dull comprehension. M. Meissonier's picture rep-
resents one of those Napoleonic episodes which he has so-
often treated, and of which he has so completely mas-
tered the costume and the historical expression ; he en-
titles it simply "1807." The work is a yard and a half

35

Parisian Sketches

long and I suppose about three quarters of a yard high.
It is probable that the painter considers it his greatest
achievement, for he has evidently spent a world of care
and research upon it. The critics in general, appar-
ently, are not of this mind; most of them are of the
opinion that the success, on the whole, is not propor-
tionate to the attempt. The artist, I imagine, has de-
sired not so much to represent a particular battle as to
give a superb pictorial expression of the glory of Na-
poleon at its climax. It was about in 1807 that it
reached its zenith; then there were no clouds nor
intermissions nor lapses. The battle of Eylau was
fought in 1807, but it took place, if I remember
rightly, in the winter, and the ground, in M. Meis-
sonier's picture, is covered with the deep verdure of
June. 4 At any rate Napoleon stands on a mound in
the middle distance, beyond which, beneath a bril-
liant, lightly dappled sky, a mighty battle is going
on. Around him are his marshals and his aids, em-
broidered on all their seams, as the phrase is, choking
in their stocks and glittering with their orders. The
Emperor strides his white horse, and sits like a Caesar
on a monument, to return the salute of the troops that
are sweeping past him. M. Meissonier paints him at the
moment when he was probably handsomest, the mid-
season between the meagerness of his earlier years and
the livid corpulence of his later ones. He looks in this
portrait, small as it is, prodigiously like a man to be-
lieve in. The foreground of the picture, to the right, is
occupied by a troop of cuirassiers, who are galloping

Parisian Sketches

into action ; they are the morituri who salute the Caesar
Imperator, and they form the real subject of the work.
They are magnificently painted, and full, I will not say
of movement Meissonier, to my sense, never represents
it but of force and completeness of detail. This colo-
nel is exactly passing the spectators, to whom, as he
twists himself in his saddle to lift his saber and bellow
forth his "Vive VEmpereur!" he turns his back. His
pose, with its stiffened elongated leg, its contortion in
the saddle, its harmony with the thundering gallop of
the horse, is admirably rendered. Behind him come
plunging and rattling the others, with their long swords
flashing white in the blue air, their heads thrown back
and turned to the Emperor, their mouths wide open,
their acclamations almost audible, their equipments
flapping and jingling, and their horses straining and
clattering in a common impetus. They are trampling
through the high, poppy-strewn grass, where the
crushed flowers seem already like the spatter of blood.
To the left there is a slight interval, filled, in the dis-
tance, with the gleam of maneuvering squadrons, be-
yond which comes riding forward a group of gorgeous
hussars. It bothered the spectators a little that they
should look as if they might come into collision, diag-
onally, with the cuirassiers. They are riding slowly,
however, and they may sit under their great furred bon-
nets and watch the charge. All this goes on in a glare
of sunshine ; there are no clouds, no shadows ; nothing
but high lights and unrelieved colors. This sustained
unity of light, as it were, is, I take it, a great achieve-

37

Parisian Sketches

ment, and must have won much applause from people
who have attempted similar feats. The picture has ex-
traordinary merits, but I have seen works of a slighter
ability that have pleased me more.

It is hard, however, to admire it restrictively without
seeming to admire it less than one really does. It seems
to me it is a thing of parts rather than an interesting
whole. The parts are admirable, and the more you ana-
lyze them the better they seem. The best thing, say, is
a certain cuirassier, and in the cuirassier the best thing
is his clothes, and in his clothes the best thing is his
leather straps, and in his leather straps the best thing
is the buckles. This is the kind of work you find your-
self performing over the picture ; you may go on indefi-
nitely. The great general impression which, first and
foremost, it is the duty of an excellent picture to give
you, seems to me to be wanting here. M. Meissonier is
the great archaeologist of the Napoleonic era ; he un-
derstands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand
Army. He is equally familiar with the facial types, and
he renders marvelously the bronzed and battered physi-
ognomies that scowl from the deep shadow of shakos
and helmets. Each man is perfect, but when M. Meis-
sonier has made him an elaborate, accomplished his-
torical image he has done his utmost. He feels under
no necessity to do anything with him, to place him in
any complex relation with anything else, to make any
really imaginative uses of him. This suggests to the
observer a want of something which he thinks it a great
pity a painter of M. Meissonier's powers should not

-88

Parisian Sketches

possess a want intellectual, moral, spiritual ; I hardly
know what to call it. He resents the attempt to interest
him so closely in costume and type, and he privately
clamors for an idea. It is this "idea" that is somehow
conspicuous by its absence in M. Meissonier's pictures ;
and yet in so eminent a painter you cannot help looking-
for it. But, to my sense, they are dry and cold. Look
at them beside a Gerome, indeed, and they seem to
bloom and teem with high suggestions; but look at
them beside a Delacroix or a Millet and they appear
only brilliantly superficial. It is a difference like the
difference to the eye between plate glass and gushing
water.

But why should I talk of pictures when Paris itself,
for the last few days, has formed an immense and bril-
liant picture. French babies, I believe, hang up their
stocking or put a shoe into the stove on New Year's
Eve ; but Christmas, nevertheless, has been very good-
humoredly kept. I have never seen Paris so charming
as on this last Christmas Day. The weather put in a
claim to a share in the fun, the sky was radiant and the
air as soft and pure as a southern spring. It was a day
to spend in the streets and all the world did so. I passed
it strolling half over the city and wherever I turned I
found the entertainment that a pedestrian relishes.
What people love Paris for became almost absurdly
obvious: charm, beguilement, diversion were stamped
upon everything. I confess that, privately, I kept
thinking of Prince Bismarck and wishing he might
take a turn upon the boulevards. Not that they would

Parisian Sketches

have flustered him much, I suppose, for, after all, the
boulevards are not human; but the whole spectacle
seemed a supreme reminder of the fact so constantly
present at this time to the reflective mind the amazing
elasticity of France. Beaten and humiliated on a scale
without precedent, despoiled, dishonored, bled to death
financially all this but yesterday Paris is today in
outward aspect as radiant, as prosperous, as instinct
with her own peculiar genius as if her sky had never
known a cloud. The friendly stranger cannot refuse an
admiring glance to this mystery of wealth and thrift
and energy and good spirits. I don't know how Berlin
looked on Christmas Day, though Christmas-keeping
is a German specialty, but I greatly doubt whether its
aspect would have appealed so irresistibly to the sym-
pathies of the impartial observer. With the approach
of Christmas here the whole line of the boulevards is
bordered on each side with a row of little booths for
the sale for the sale of everything conceivable. The
width of the classic asphalt is so ample that they form
no serious obstruction, and the scene, in the evening
especially, presents a picturesque combination of the
rustic fair and the highest Parisian civilization. You
may buy anything in the line of trifles in the world,
from a cotton nightcap to an orange neatly pricked in
blue letters with the name of the young lady Adle
or Ernestine to whom you may gallantly desire to
present it. On the other side of the crowded channel the
regular shops present their glittering portals, deco-
rated for the occasion with the latest refinements of the

40

Parisian Sketches

trade. The confectioners in particular are amazing ; the
rows of marvelous bonbonnieres look like precious six-
teenth-century caskets and reliquaries, chiseled by
Florentine artists, in the glass cases of great museums.
The boribonniere, in its elaborate and impertinent use-
lessness, is certainly the consummate flower of material
luxury; it seems to bloom, with its petals of satin and
its pistils of gold, upon the very apex of the tree of
civilization.

I walked over to Notre Dame along the quays, and
was more than ever struck with the brilliant pictur-
esqueness of Paris as, from any point opposite to the
Louvre, you look up and down the Seine. The huge
towers of Notre Dame, rising with their blue-gray tone
from the midst of the great mass round which the river
divides, the great Arc de Triomphe answering them
with equal majesty in the opposite distance, the splen-
did continuous line of the Louvre between, and over
it all the charming coloring of Paris on certain days
the brightness, the pearly grays, the flicker of light,
the good taste, as it were, of the atmosphere all this
is an entertainment which even custom does not stale.
In the midst of it the good people were trudging in
thousands, on their various festive errands, well dressed
and well disposed. Every tenth man one sees in the
streets at present is a soldier, and though this fact has
doubtless a melancholy meaning in the moral scale, it
has a high value in the picturesque. The cuirassiers es-
pecially are numerous, and their glittering helmets
light up the crowd. The mass of buildings in front of

Parisian Sketches

Notre Dame has been removed within the last couple
of years, and the open space across which you approach
the church is of immense extent. It is quite the ideal
"chance" for a great cathedral. Notre Dame profits
by it, and her noble fa9ade looks more impressive than
ever. I went in and listened to vespers, and watched the
sounding nave grow dusky and the yellow light turn
pale on the eastern clerestory, and then I wandered
away and crossed the river farther, and climbed that
imperceptible eminence known as the "mountain" of
St. Genevieve, and bent my steps to the curious Church
of St. fitienne du Mont the church that hides its
florid little Renaissance fa9ade behind the huge neo-
classic drum of the Pantheon. Here I was only in time
for the sermon, but, with all respect to French pulpit
eloquence, which often has a most persuasive grace, it
was time enough. I turned, before long, a deaf ear to
the categories of virtue and vice it was like the dread-
ful nomenclature of chemistry and wandered apart
to the shrine of St. Genevieve. The bones of this holy
woman repose in a great brazen tomb in one of the
chapels, surrounded with votive tapers. The scene was
very picturesque. A number of women were on their
knees around it, in the illumined dusk, presenting vari-
ous objects to be blessed. A young priest opened a sort
of circular lid in the sepulcher, held the object down
into the hole, murmured something over it, and re-
stored it. Some of the articles exposed to the influence
of the beatific ashes were singularly prosaic. One, for
instance, was a clean shirt, rigidly plaited and starched.

Parisian Sketches

The motive of this application puzzled me; was the
applicant a laundress? She was probably the pious
relative of a sick man who was contemplating a change
of linen. In either case, I seemed to have walked far
away from the boulevards, and from the Christmas Day
of 1875.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
January 22, 1876

48

5

THE PARISIAN STAGE

Letter -from Henry James, Jr.

THE DRAMA AS IT IS POPULARITY OF "OP^RA BOUFFE"

ROSSI AS MACBETH SUCCESS OF SARDOU's "FERRiEOL"

DEARTH OF NEW PIECES

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Jan. 7. That the theater plays in Paris a
larger part in people's lives than it does anywhere else
is by this time a fact too well established to need es-
pecial comment. It is one of the first facts that comes
under the observation of the resident foreigner, who
very soon perceives that the theater is an essential part
of French civilization, in regard to which it keeps up
a lively process of action and reaction. It is not a mere
amusement, as it is in other countries ; it is an interest,
an institution, connected through a dozen open doors
with literature, art, and society. There are, of course,
plenty of people who assure you that the French stage
of today is nothing but a name ; that its great days are
over, and that to know the perfection of acting one
should have been born seventy years ago. Born, unfor-
tunately, more recently, I have seen neither Talma, nor

The Parisian Stage

Mile. Mars, nor Mile. Georges, nor Madame Dorval,
nor Rachel, nor Frederic Lemaitre, and in such a case,
though it is disagreeable to have to assent to invidious
reflections, it is difficult to gainsay them. 1 But even
without this questionable privilege of depressing com-
parison, I must add that I find it easy to imagine the
French stage being better than it is. I remember
vaguely Rose Cheri, and distinctly Mile. Desclee. 2 The
best acting in Paris is extremely good, at the present
time, but the second best is not so much better than it
is elsewhere, as it is sometimes assumed to be. I take
it that the sign of a highly flourishing state of dramatic
art is excellence in secondary positions finish in out-
of-the-way places. This is what Mr. Ruskin praises in
the art of the greatest architecture, and the analogy
may be carried into the labors of the actor. Is it true,
then, that the golden days of the French stage are
over? I shall not pretend to say, but I think that a
critic of greater courage might find some support for
an affirmative answer. He might, indeed, while he was
about it, go on to argue that the happy time of the
acted drama has passed away the world over. He might,
if he were philosophically inclined, remark that the
dramatic art requires, both in performers and specta-
tors, a certain simplicity, a naivete, an abeyance of the
critical spirit which are rapidly passing out of human
life. To produce very good acting there should be a
class of performers and a public in whom subtlety has
not attained its maximum. If evidence in favor of this
assertion were needed, I should venture to point to

45

Parisian Sketches

two striking cases of essentially modern acting which
I have lately witnessed as samples of the harm that can
be done by the absence of what I have called na*ivet6.
One is the Macbeth of Mr. Henry Irving, which I lately
saw in London; the other is the Macbeth of Signor
Ernesto Rossi, which I saw the other night here. I do
not know how Garrick or Charles Kemble or Edmund
Kean 8 played the part, or how Talma would have
played it if he had been allowed : but as I watched the
English and the Italian tragedian I murmured within
myself, "Oh, for one touch of Kemble or of Talma!"
one touch of good faith, of the ideal, the simple. But
Irving and Rossi are very clever actors, and these re-
marks have perhaps an air of aberration. So far as
such matters in Paris are concerned, it may be enough
to allude, in confirmation of a gloomy view of the fu-
ture of the stage, to the inordinate prosperity, of late
years, of opSra bouffe. This phenomenon, I should say,
could only have been possible in a community which
had ceased to take the theater with that degree of seri-
ousness which is necessary for its perfect good health.
A person fond of the stage and indifferent to op&ra
bouffe has not just now a very comfortable time of it.
At least a third of the theaters are given over to the
strains of Offenbach, of Lecocq, and of Herv6, 4 and the
photographs of the actresses who impart to these melo-
dies the requisite complement of grimace and gesture,
simper at you from fevery second shopwindow. My
present complaint of the Cruche Cas$6e and the Creole 5
is not that they are vulgar or trivial or indecent, but

46

The Parisian Stage

simply that they are unhistrionic. They give up the
stage to something which not only is not acting, but
is a positive denial of acting. To act is to produce an
illusion ; to interpret Offenbach is to snap your fingers
and thrust out your tongue at illusion to try and
make it appear that a young woman in the audience,
too frolicsome, really, to be suffered to go at large, has
scrambled upon the stage and is using the footlights
in the interest of her sentimental relations with a plu-
rality of individuals in the house. The favorite actress
in opera bouffe at the present hour is Mme. Judic,* an
extremely pretty woman. An inventory of Mme. Judic's
artistic stock in trade would be really a very curious
document. After Mme, Judic in popular favor comes
Celine Chaumont, who is not nearly so pretty, but in-
finitely cleverer. Mme. Chaumont is indeed so clever,
and has such genuine dramatic gifts, that it is very
dismal to see what opera bouffe is making of her.

The winter season is in full operation at the theaters,
but I hardly know upon what novelties to confer the
honor of an especial mention. I have already spoken
of Rossi, to whom I just now alluded. He pursues his
triumphant career, and having exhausted the popular-
ity of Kean, has added Macbeth to his Shakespearean
performances. 7 His acting in this part, as in every
other, is at once very fine and very coarse. I should say
he was poorest in the best places and best in the com-
paratively unimportant ones. In this he resembles Mr.
Henry Irving, who is so meager in the essential and
so redundant in the (relatively) superfluous. Rossi is

47

Parisian Sketches

a superb stage figure, and every now and then he has
a cry, a movement, a look, which goes straight to the
mark; but, as a whole, I thought his Macbeth a de-
cidedly bungling affair. It was ludicrously Italian
I am sorry to associate so disrespectful an adverb with
so glorious an adjective. It is true, however, that in
most cases of an alternation of good taste and bad, the
genius of modern Italy decides for the bad. The scene
of Duncan's murder is disfigured by the most absurd
ventriloquial effects on the part of the shuddering
Thane, who makes an elaborate attempt to give his
wife an idea of the way the voices of the sleeping
grooms sounded. Fancy the distracted chieftain reeling
out red-handed from his crime and beginning to give
"imitations." The scene with Banquo's ghost was dis-
appointing, and the address to the specter singularly
weak. It is a good indication of Rossi's caliber that he
depends for his final effect here upon a very puerile
piece of ingenuity. The scene has been vulgarly acted
and vulgarly declaimed ; Signor Rossi has been reserv-
ing himself. And for what? As Macbeth leaves the
apartment with his wife, after the departure of the
guests, he stumbles upon his long mantle, trips, falls,
and rolls over with his heels in the air. His mind is so
full of supernatural horrors that he thinks the ghost
of Banquo is still playing him tricks, and he lies crouch-
ing and quaking, to see what is coming next. It is a
handsome somersault, certainly, but I do not think it
can be called acting Shakespeare. The actress who
plays Lady Macbeth with Signor Rossi has obtained

48*

The Parisian Stage

a great success a success which owes nothing to felic-
ity of costume. I spoke just now of "good faith," and
of Italian bad taste ; Mme. Pareti-Glech puts these two
things together and produces a striking result. The
Italians, after all, if you make them a certain allow-
ance, have an instinctive sense of the picturesque which
is beyond our culture. Grant that Lady Macbeth's in-
fluence over her husband was a purely physical one,
and this obscure southern artist is superb. You should
see the gesture with which, in her call upon nature to
"unsex" herself, she utters the great "Hold, hold!"
or those with which, to raise Macbeth to his senses be-
fore the visitors who have been knocking at the gate
are admitted, she shakes him about and chokes him by
his coat collar.

The most successful play of the winter, up to this
time, has been the Ferreol of Victorien Sardou, and it
is an agreeable fact that it is also the best. It is con-
summately clever, in M. Sardou's usual way, and is
acted at the Gymnase in a manner to throw its clever-
ness into extraordinary relief. It literally palpitates
with interest, as the phrase is, and from the first word
and to the last the spectator is under the charm. The
charm with M. Sardou is not of a very high quality ;
he makes a play very much as he would make a pud-
ding; he has his well-tested recipe and his little stores
of sugar and spice, from which he extracts with an
unimpassioned hand exactly the proper quantity of
each. The pudding is capital, but I can think of no
writer of equal talent who puts so little of himself into

49

Parisian Sketches

his writing. Search M. Sardou's plays through and you
will not find a trace of a personal conviction, of a moral
emotion, of an intellectual temperament, of anything
that makes the "atmosphere" of a work. They seem to
have been produced in a sort of mental vacuum. But
they are not played in a vacuum by any means, and
Ferreol bids fair to run for a good pax^t of the rest of
the winter. It has made the reputation, and, theatri-
cally, the fortune of an admirable young actor named
Worms. 8 1 don't know when I have seen a piece of act-
ing that has given me such unmitigated satisfaction as
M. Worms's representation of the distracted hero of
this piece. He has seen a man murdered as he himself
was leaving clandestinely at two o'clock in the morning
the house of the woman he loves, and his lips are sealed
by the fact of his position. His best friend is arrested
on suspicion and condemned by the strongest circum-
stantial evidence, and yet he cannot make a declaration
which involves publication of the circumstance that his
point of view, as a witness, was the garden wall of Mme.
de Bois-MarteL This lady (who had imprudently per-
mitted his visit) is in equal distress, and the unhappy
couple are buffeted to and fro between the sense of their
duty and of their dangers. I need not say how the
problem is solved, for sooner or later, I suppose, Per-
rSol will be "adapted." But in losing M. Worms it will
lose half its power. This young actor has a gift of quiet
realism, of mingled vehemence and discretion, of im-
passioned self-control, which places him at a jump be-
side Delaunay, 9 the classic jeiwe premier of the Th^&tre

SO

The Parisian Stage

Franpais, whom, however, he resembles only in the per-
fection of his art. The Franpais has promptly marked
hirn for her own. Under her fostering care he can ripen
and develop at his ease.

Actors are just now indeed rather too much at their
ease at this establishment, which has produced this win-
ter but a single new piece a little one-act comedy by
M. Pailleron. 10 When the Theatre Franpais can do
nothing else, as a critic said the other day, she can
drape herself in her majesty^-she can draw from her
immense historical repertory. The drapery is most
voluminous and becoming, but the terms of the Theatre
Franpais's magnificent contract with the state are that
she shall increase her inheritance and think of the fu-
ture as well as the past. M. Pailleron's comedy. Petite
Plme by name, has had a moderate success, which it
owes wholly to the incomparable skill of Mme. Plessy. 11
There is a double interest in watching Mme. Plessy, as
with the present winter she is to close her long and
brilliant career. She has probably never done anything
more purely brilliant than the part she plays in the
piece I have just mentioned. The comedy treats of a
young woman who has eloped from a villa on the
French Riviera, near the Italian frontier, with a secre-
tary of legation, and who arrives with her lover in her
ball dress at a wayside inn, to which the guilty couple
have been driven by a sudden storm and by a fracture
of the shafts of their carriage. Here they are overtaken
by the friend from whose domicile, while paying her a
visit and dancing at her ball, the fair fugitive has fled

51

Parisian Sketches

a clever woman of the world, who disapproves alto-
gether of elopements, takes a skeptical view of love, and
recommends Mme. de Thiais to return to her husband,
shabby fellow as he is. While the secretary of legation
is out under the shed, pottering over his broken shaft
with the drowsy innkeeper, the two ladies have it out
together. The elder one riddles her friend's illusions
with her wit, gives her a wholesome fright, and with a
curtsy to the naughty attach^ takes her off under her
arm. This scene is acted by Mme. Plessy with a spirit
and style and grace what the French call an author-
ity which are certainly the last word of high comedy.
Mme. Plessy is not (to my thinking) a woman of
genius ; she is not even a sympathetic actress ; there is
something always rather hard and metallic in her style.
But she is so consummate, so accomplished, so perfect
a mistress of the subtlest resources of her art, that to
follow her through the light and shade of a long speech
is not merely an amusement, but a real intellectual
profit. When I think of all the experience, the observa-
tion, the reflection, the contact with life and art which
are summed up in such a mellow maturity of skill, I am
struck with a kind of veneration. Of the other theaters
there is nothing very important to narrate. The Revue
prevails at several of them, notably at the Varit6s, 12
which is supposed to be its stronghold that dreary,
flimsy burlesque of the events of the year, which is
the pretext for so many bad jokes and undressed fi-
gurantes. The Palais Royal is, as always, exhaustingly
exhilarating, with Le Panache a long farce in which

52

The Parisian Stage

the element of quiet comedy is thought to be more
marked than usual. This speaks well for the farces of
the past. Lastly, the Vaudeville with Les Scandales
d'Hier, 1 - 4 and a company augmented by Pierre Berton
from the Fran?ais 5 and Mile. Pierson of the Gymnase
mysterious fugitives both has been expending some
very good acting on a very indifferent play.

HENKY JAMES, JR.
January 29, 1876

53

6

PARISIAN LIFE

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

POLITICS AND THE DRAMA THE PROGRESS OF THE ELEC-
TORAL CAMPAIGN MINISTER BUFFET'S DREAD OF "sO-

CIAL PERIL" THE NEW RUSSIAN DRAMA THE ACTOR
ROSSI AS ROMEO

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Jan. 18. It seems just now, in writing from
Paris, rather light-minded to speak of anything else
than the political situation, but if one has a decent pre-
text for holding one's tongue about French politics, I
think one is a great fool not to take advantage of it.
Nothing else, it is true, is talked about. 1 The elections
are all-pervasive, and no one has attention for anything
but the crimes, or the virtues (as he may happen to
consider them), of M. Buffet. 2 There is, of course, an
infinite amount of more or less ferocious discussion, and
every man suspects a political adversary in every other.
When I say that it is a blessing not to be obliged to
discuss, I mean that if one is disposed that way, one
may find at every turn the most vivid reminder of the
vanity of passionate argument. The intensity of politi-

Parisian Life

cal discussions is sharper in France than it is anywhere
else which is the case, indeed, with every sort of dif-
ference of opinion. There are more camps and coteries
and "sets" than among Anglo-Saxons, and the gulf
which divides each group from every other is more
hopelessly and fatally impassable. 3 Nothing is more
striking to a foreigner, even after he thinks he has
grown used to such things, than the definiteness with
which people here are classed and ticketed. The ticket
reads so or so, of course, according to your point of
view ; but to the man who wears another ticket it always
reads villainously. You ask a writer whose productions
you admire some questions about any other writer, for
whose works you have also a relish. "Oh, he is of the
School of This or That; he is of the queue of So and
So," he answers. "We think nothing of him: you
mustn't talk of him here; for us he doesn't exist. 5 ' And
you turn away, meditative, and perhaps with a little
private elation at being yourself an unconsolidated
American and able to enjoy both Mr. A. and Mr. X. 4
who enjoy each other so little. Of course subsequently
you do them justice in their mutual aversions, and per-
ceive that some of the qualities you admire in their
writings are really owing to their being intrenched be-
hind their passwords. A little school that dislikes every
other school, but is extremely active and industrious
within its own circle, is an excellent engine for the pro-
duction of limited perfection, and French literature
abounds in books in which particular tendencies have
been pushed to lengths which only a sort of artistic

55

Parisian Sketches

conspiracy of many minds could have reached, but
which seem like mere blind alleys of thought, where ex-
plorers perish, suffocated for want of having taken
heed of possible issues to right or left. It is simply the
old story that, either in politics or in literature, French-
men are ignorant of the precious art of compromise.
The imagination sinks helpless before the idea of a
Monarchist and a Republican ever really coming to
terms. The Legitimists the other day formed a tempo-
rary coalition with the Republicans for the sake of
keeping the Orleanists out of the Senate, but this was
not because they loved the Republicans more, but be-
cause they loved the Orleanists less. And yet this sounds
almost like blasphemy in presence of the fact that the
Republic is every day making converts from the mo-
narchical ranks.

Nothing succeeds like success, and it must seem to
any sensible Frenchman, who is not a simple partisan,
that the excellent position of France before the world
at the present time offers really no decent pretext for
pretending that the Republic is not sufficient and safe.
But it is nevertheless true that every convert the pres-
ent regime makes is a supreme testimony to the force
of good example and of liberal ideas. This is the more
true that a deplorable example is being so continually
offered to recalcitrant patriots by M. Buffet the agi-
tated minister of a profoundly tranquil country, as Le
Temps, a day or two ago, very happily called him. To
an unattached outsider like myself, who has nothing
but his personal impressions to go by, M. Buffet seems

56

Parisian Life

bent on goading a thoroughly well-disposed and well-
conducted country to desperation. His theory is that
however well-conducted France may be, she is so only
by compulsion and so long as she feels the strong hand,
and that she is not in the least well disposed. All his
talk is of "social peril," but no one can in the least
imagine what he means. To keep the country quiet he
sticks needles into her, and to set an example of mu-
tual confidence he shakes his watchman's rattle. M.
Buffet is a frightened man; he has never recovered
from the Commune. 5 The Commune was certainly not
reassuring, but it weighs lightly in the scale compared
with the general attitude of the country, which con-
siders that the Republic has established fair ground
for presumption in its favor, which has a desire for
rest and peace and work and order at least as lively as
the Prime Minister's, and which believes that the best
guarantee of these comforts is a frank acceptance of
the Republic. It is probable that this will be sufficiently
manifested in the result of the general elections, which
began yesterday by the election of delegates by the
municipal councils. The rural districts are with the
present occasion to express themselves more directly in
political affairs than they have ever done before. Mar-
shal MacMahon 6 has ushered in the campaign with a
proclamation which is placarded in all the streets, and
which, though it expresses very correct sentiments,
strikes me as a rather regrettable performance. A proc-
lamation of the Chief of the State addressed directly
to the nation over the heads of the ministry is a step

57

Parisian Sketches

so irregular and abnormal that it should be resorted
to only in moments of extraordinary public peril. This
is far from being such a moment, and it is paying no
compliment to the country at large to assume it to be,
and to pretend that the nation is in need of this por-
tentous reminder of the rudimentary duties of patri-
otism. This is all the proclamation contains, with the
exception of a more satisfactory passage, which M.
Buffet probably did not enjoy having to countersign,
promising that the Marshal will favor no revision of
the present Constitution until it has been fairly and
loyally tested which it has not been yet. The procla-
mation is unfortunate because it interrupts that most
desirable process, the formation in France of a tradi-
tion in favor of impersonal government. Such a tradi-
tion is slowly and laboriously shaping itself, and every
month that France continues both prosperous and par-
liamentary will lend it more authority. But I think it
can be said that the document in question has neither
unduly discomposed nor unduly comforted the mass of
good citizens.

I went too far just now in saying that nothing but
politics is talked about: everyone finds a word for Les
Danicheff r and I suppose that I should therefore find
a word for them too. Les Danicheff is a drama of mys-
terious origin which has just been brought out with
extraordinary success at the Odon Theater, and is at-
tracting all Paris to that remote and unfriended estab-
lishment. Its origin is as mysterious as anything can
be with which M. Alexandre Dumas is associated for

5*

Parisian Life

the play has been largely retouched and manipulated
by him. It is the work of a Russian author who calls
himself on the bills, fictitiously, M. Pierre Newsky, but
who is otherwise unknown. The story goes that he
brought his drama a year ago to the author of the
Demi-Monde to ask his opinion of it, and that Dumas
replied that the subject was magnificent but the treat-
ment in a high degree clumsy. Then, by way of point-
ing out errors, he sat down with his docile petitioner
and fairly made the play over. Its success is in a great
measure owing to the more famous author's remarkable
scenic science which forms a distinct and easily recog-
nizable ingredient. The smartness is all Dumas' the
epigrams, the tirades, the aphorisms, by this time
rather drearily familiar, about the fathomless deprav-
ity of the female sex. But the theme of the piece is so
picturesque and effective that it carries Dumas' faults
hardly less easily than his merits. It has the charm of
being strange and novel, and not dealing with the ever-
lasting seventh commandment as interpreted on the
boulevards. In spite of this, however, the story is easier
to tell in French than in English. A Russian countess
of autocratic temper picks out a wife for her only son,
the ardent and gallant young Vladimir. He declines his
mother's offer, and intimates that he is in love with a
young girl, by birth a serf, whom she has educated and
admitted into her drawing room. Scandalized and hor-
rified, she attempts to reason away his passion, but he
is deaf to arguments and threats, and insists upon
marrying the modest and amiable Anna. The Countess

59

Parisian Sketches

obtains of him that he will at least absent himself for a
year from home, to test the permanency of his affection
that he will repair to Moscow, frequent the society of
his equals, and do his best to fall in love. He departs,
and as soon as his back is turned she summons Anna
and marries her, willy-nilly, out of hand, to the coach-
man. The coachman, a certain Osip, in his black velvet
knickerbockers and his red silk caftan, is the real hero
of the piece. The scene of the marriage is very effective,
and makes a striking picture all the serfs convoked
and ranged solemnly round, the long-bearded pope,
the picturesque moujik, with a soul above his station,
the high-handed old Countess in the middle, flanked by
her parrot, her lap dog, and her two grotesque and
servile old lady companions, and the poor young girl,
vainly entreating and sobbing, in the pitying silence,
and twisting herself at the feet of her mistress. Her re-
sistance and her prayers are vain, and, secretly in love
as she is with Vladimir, she is shuffled into the arms of
Osip. The coachman is an old-time comrade of the heir
of the house, who, when they were boys together, had
treated him almost as an equal, and toward whom he
has always preserved a devoted loyalty. Vladimir, on
hearing of Anna's marriage, comes back from Moscow
like a whirlwind, long before his year is out, and his
savage irruption, whip in hand, into the cottage of the
humble couple produces a great effect. This is so well
rendered by the young actor who plays the part that
the audience breaks out into long applause before he
has spoken a word. Then follows a scene between the

60

Parisian Life

two young men which it required some delicacy to han-
dle. The upshot of it is that Osip, instead of deserving
his young master's opprobrium for what he has done,
has earned his gratitude. He has contented himself
with being Anna's husband but in name he has
piously abstained from the exercise of marital rights
he has accepted the young girl (whom, of course, he se-
cretly adores), only as a sacred deposit. The marriage
shall be broken and he will hand her over to Vladimir.
I need not relate the conclusion of the piece, for after
this exalted flight the most felicitous conclusion must
be more or less of an anticlimax. The obvious objection
to the story is that Osip is too ethereal a fellow for a
Russian coachman : but the authors have made him plau-
sible, the part is singularly well played, and for myself,
I do not object to fanciful creation. What I enjoyed in
Les Danicheff, in spite of the very sensible presence of
Dumas, is a certain imaginative good faith and naivete
which offer a grateful change from the familiar gyra-
tions of that terribly tough and lean old performer,
I 'esprit parisien.

I have it on my conscience, while touching on these
matters, to say another word about Ernesto Rossi, of
whom I have spoken hitherto with a certain meagerness
of praise. He has lately appeared as Romeo, 8 and
though he has attracted less attention in the part than
in some others, it is the one in which he has given me
most pleasure. He has scandalously mutilated the play,
but there is a certain compensation in the fact that what
he has left of it sounds wonderfully well in Italian. One

61

Parisian Sketches

never sees Shakespeare played without being reminded
at some new point of his greatness : the other night what
struck me was the success with which, for the occasion,
he had Italianized his fancy. The things that trouble
us nowadays in Romeo and Juliet the redundancy of
protestation, the importunate conceits, the embarras-
sing frankness all these fall into their place in the
rolling Italian diction, and what one seems to see is not
a translation, but a restitution. It is singular that Rossi
should play best the part that he looks least, for a
stout, middle-aged man one would say that Romeo was
rather a snare. But it is with Romeo very much as with
Juliet ; by the time an actor has acquired the assurance
necessary for playing the part, he has lost his youth
and his slimness. Robust and mature as he is, Rossi
does it as a consummate artist ; it is impossible to imag-
ine anything more picturesquely tender, more intensely
ardent. As I have said, he has done very much what
he chose with the play, but it is not to be denied that
in one or two cases he has almost made his modifica-
tions pardonable. He makes Juliet come to her senses
in the tomb and discover her inanimate lover before
Romeo has utterly expired. Besides enabling the hap-
less couple to perish in each other's arms, this gives
Rossi an opportunity for a great stroke of dumb show
the sort of thing in which he decidedly excels. He has
staggered away from the tomb while the poison, which
he has just drunk, is working, and stands with his back
to it as Juliet noiselessly revives and emerges. He re-
turns to it, finds it empty, looks about him, and sees

62

Parisian Life

Juliet standing a short distance off, and looking in the
dim vault like a specter. He has been bending over the
empty tomb, and his eyes fall upon her as he slowly
rises. His movement of solemn terror as he slowly throws
up his arms and continues to rise and rise, until, with
his whole being dilated, he stands staring and appalled,
on tiptoe, is, although it is grotesque in description,
very well worth seeing. Rossi's speeches are often weak,
but when he attempts an acutely studied piece of pan-
tomime he never misses it. This superiority of his pan-
tomime to his delivery seems to me to fix him, in spite
of his great talent, in the second line of actors.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
February 5, 1876

63

PARISIAN TOPICS

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

VICTOR HUGO'S ADDRESS TO THE COMMUNAL DELEGATES
FRENCH NATIONAL VANITY THE LAMARTINE MONU-
MENT PARISIAN "CONFERENCES" THE PAINTER PILS'S

CAREER AND WORKS

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Jan. 28. The newspapers for the last fort-
night have contained little else than addresses and pro-
grams from candidates for the Senate and the Cham-
bers. One of the most remarkable documents of this
kind is a sort of pronunciamiento from Victor Hugo, 1
who is not indeed a possible Senator or Deputy, but
who has been nominated delegate to the electoral col-
lege of the Seine for the election of Senators. The elec-
tion in this department promises to wear a rather
ruddy hue, and if M. Hugo's utterances have any in-
fluence upon it, it will certainly be red enough. We shall
see, however, for it comes off on the thirtieth of the
month. It seems incredible that Victor Hugo's political
vaticinations should have a particle of influence upon
any human creature ; but I have no doubt that they re-

64'

Parisian Topics

verberate sonorously enough in some of the obscurer
couches societies, and there is no reason indeed why the
same influences which shaped Victor Hugo should not
have produced a number of other people who are like
him in everything except in having genius. But in these
matters his genius does not count, for it is certainly
absent enough from his address to the "delegates of the
36,000 communes of France." It might have been be-
lieved that he had already given the measure of the
power of the human mind to delude itself with mere
words and phrases, but his originality in this direction
is quite unequaled, and perhaps I did wrong to say
that there was no genius in it. There is, at any rate, a
genius for pure verbosity. What he has to say to his
36,000 brother delegates is that "Babylon has the hero-
ism of Saragossa," that "upon this Paris which merited
all venerations have been heaped all affronts," that the
world "has measured the quantity of insult it has
poured forth to the quantity of respect that was owed."
It is worth quoting. "What matters, however? In tak-
ing from her her diadem as capital of France, her ene-
mies have laid bare her brain as capital of the world.
This great forehead of Paris is now entirely visible, all
the more radiant that it is discrowned. Henceforth the
nations unanimously recognize Paris as the leading
city of the human race." M. Hugo proceeds to summon
his electors "to decree the end of abuses by the advent
of truths, to affirm France before Germanism, Paris be-
fore Rome, light before night." Whether or not as a
nation the French are more conceited than their neigh-

66-

Parisian Sketches

bors is a question that may be left undecided; a very
good case on this charge might be made out against
every nation. But certainly France occasionally pro-
duces individuals who express the national conceit with
a transcendent fatuity which is not elsewhere to be
matched. A foreign resident in the country may speak
upon this point with feeling; it makes him extremely
uncomfortable. I don't know how it affects people who
dislike French things to see their fantastic claims for
their spiritual mission in the world, but it is extremely
disagreeable for those who like them. Such persons de-
sire to enjoy in a tranquil and rational manner the
various succulent fruits of French civilization, but they
have no fancy for being committed to perpetual genu-
flections and prostrations. They read Victor Hugo's
windy sublimities in the evening paper over their pro-
fanely well-cooked dinners, and probably on leaving
the restaurant their course lies along the brilliantly il-
luminated boulevard. The aspect of the boulevards, of
a fine, mild evening, is as cheerful as you please, but it
exhibits a number of features which are not especially
provocative of "veneration." Perhaps the irritated for-
eigner we are imagining is going to hear the Timbdle
d' Argent or the Petite Marine 2 and he asks himself at
what particular point of these compositions the brain
of the capital of the world is laid bare. A good
many other things are laid bare, but brain is not
among them. Of course Victor Hugo, as a political
adviser, is taken au serieux by very few people, but
the fact remains that one is liable to meet him in this

66

Parisian Topics

character in one's evening paper; and it is an amusing
fact.

Victor Hugo's old poetic rival, or rather his brother
in the Muse, the generous Castor of this impetuous
Pollux, has also just been having an hour's reappear-
ance as an "actuality." A very brilliant performance
was given the other day at the Porte Saint-Martin
Theater in aid of the fund for erecting a statue to Al-
phonse de Lamartine. 8 This is always found to be the
most effective way of raising money in France, and it
generally produces large sums. People who will not put
down their names for a franc on a subscription paper
will joyously pay the requisite fee for the privilege of
jamming themselves into an ill-placed seat in a crowded
theater on that least inspiring of occasions, a morning
performance. The other day the program was attrac-
tive, as several of Lamartine's most famous poems were
declaimed and sung by artists of the Theatre Franfais
and the Opera. It is worth a little discomfort to
hear some fine verses recited by Delaunay and Mile.
Favart. 4 There is no better proof, however, that the
good Homer sometimes nods, than that that somewhat
lurid star of the same establishment the young tra-
gedian, M. Mounet-Sully 5 should be allowed in the
matter of recitation to (in vulgar parlance) "go on"
as he does. He is a clever actor, but he has no concep-
tion of the proper way to treat beautiful lyric verse
to let it speak for itself. His rantings and sputterings
and contortions are altogether beside the mark, and it
is hard to understand how, in so august a school, he

67 *

Parisian Sketches

should have been permitted to form such habits. I be-
lieve he is a very willful young man. The piece de re-
sistance on the occasion I mention was a conference by
M. Ernest Legouve, 6 the prince of confer enciers. This
epithet may be interpreted as a compliment in any de-
gree the reader chooses. A conference (the reader may
need to be reminded) is a performance which generally
takes place in a very uncomfortable little room on the
Boulevard des Capucines, into which curiosity has oc-
casionally beguiled my steps. It is both something more
than a lecture, in our sense of the word, and something
less more by grace, but decidedly less by exertion.
The French talk off hand so much more neatly and bril-
liantly than we who have to buffet the big billows of
the English tongue can ever hope to do that almost
any clever man who will mount beside a desk with a
glass of water beside him is a very sufficient lecturer.
Perhaps that is the reason why the spectacle of such
a personage is so far from attracting a crowd. I have
never been into the room in the Boulevard des Capu-
cines without finding a motive for odd reflections. An
American is brought up to the idea that a lecturer is a
very highly developed personage, and that the profes-
sion he exercises is one of the most eminent and lucra-
tive in the world. He has been thankful for standing
room at the Cooper Institute or the Boston Music
Hall/ and he has it well in mind that, compared with
Paris, Boston and New York are generally admitted,
in the matter of evening amusements, to be steeped in
barbarism. He is surprised, therefore, to find that the

68

Parisian Topics

only hospitality offered here to this ennobling pastime
is dispensed in a little dusky, crooked room resembling
the cellar of a warehouse or a vacated stable, and that
he sometimes comes very near being the sole auditor. Is
this the glittering capital of pleasure? he asks; for all
the appointments are of the most primitive description.
I must frankly confess, however, that they are gener-
ally good enough for the conference, which is apt to be
of a very slender texture. An American lecture is some-
times "thin" enough, but a conference has an even fur-
ther degree of transparency. The only gentleman in
whose honor I have ever seen the little room in the
Boulevard des Capucines filled is M. Francisque Sar-
cey, 8 the dramatic critic of the Temps, and one of the
maitres du genre. M. Sarcey may have begun to pre-
pare his lecture ten minutes before his arrival, but I
doubt whether it has taken more of his time. It is gen-
erally upon some book which has lately appeared, and
it is often very entertaining. There could hardly be a
better example of the value of practice and of assur-
ance. If M. Sarcey can once begin he is safe. He rubs
his hands, drinks a great many glasses of water, gets
under way, drifts from one thing to another, and talks
out his hour. But at the end of it, though I may have
sat reflecting on the mysterious alchemy of the French
tongue, agreeably spoken, I have, in retrospect, felt
just a trifle bamboozled. It is, of course, very true that
I have not been forced to go there, and it is also to be
remembered that the sum taken in at the door is of the
slenderest. As the maidservant said, when, on her hay-

69

Parisian Sketches

ing saved up thirty crowns, she was asked why she mar-
ried a hunchback, "What sort of a husband can one
get for thirty crowns? 5 ' 9

The practice of collecting an artist's works into an
exhibition after his death is apparently passing from
the exception into the rule. I think it may be said that
it is only a rather broad rule that would include the
productions of poor M. Pils, 10 who died last autumn,
and whose pictures have lately been gathered into the
great hall of the ficole des Beaux Arts, the scene of
the exhibition of the works of Barye, which I mentioned
the other day. Pils was a military painter of the school,
generally speaking, of Horace Vernet 11 some of
whose merits he lacked, however, as well as many of his
defects. He was neither so good as Vernet at his best,
nor so bad as Vernet when Vernet was worse than usual.
His posthumous exhibition, nevertheless, is interesting,
and the custom, though it is liable to abuse, seems ex-
cellent. It gives an artist another chance, as it were,
another bid for fame, after nature has brought down
the hammer. Pils's life is more interesting perhaps
than his work, and it has been very sympathetically
related by M. Becq de Fouquieres. He was an immiti-
gable invalid, from the cradle, and his career was a
constant battle with disease. He painted the Crimean
and the Italian campaigns without being able to follow
the army, though he spent some time in Algeria pre-
paring an immense picture of the reception of the na-
tive chiefs by the Emperor and Empress. This work,
unfortunately, was a rather melancholy failure and is

70

Parisian Topics

not exhibited ; the Empress, who, I believe, was usually
very obliging in such matters, never succeeded in find-
ing an hour to sit for her portrait, though Pils followed
the court about for weeks, palette in hand, awaiting
his chance. It must be said, in justice, that his women
are not very lovely creations. His specialty was the
French soldier of the Second Empire, the victor of the
Alma and of Magenta, and him he thoroughly under-
stood. His great success was a huge representation of
the battle of the Alma, which now covers one whole side
of the hall of the ficole des Beaux Arts. Much of this
gigantic canvas is common and empty, but the soldiers
are real soldiers the zouaves and chasseurs really
move, with all the infinite variety of attitude of the
soldier in action. The idea with Pils, the first sketch,
and the start, were always excellent ; he broke down in
the later stages in consequence, often, of the want of
physical strength. His patience and courage under re-
iterated interruptions of this kind seem to have been
inexhaustible, and he appears to have had a large
measure of that almost touching simplicity of nature
which is frequent among French artists as in Millet
and Flandrin. 12 He painted the dome of the staircase
in the new Opera, and the brush dropped from his hand
just as he finished his work. He did not live to suffer
from the silence of the critics about it. Apollo and the
Muses were not in his line, and his pictures were over-
shadowed by the brilliant and exquisite compositions
of M. Baudry in a neighboring part of the building.
But Pils played his part he erected a monument to

71

Parisian Sketches

the old military glory of France. It was not his fault if
his pictures had an imponderable influence in precipi-
tating the country into the miseries of 1870. 1 must add
a word about a greater name than that of Pils.

Two very interesting pictures of Eugene Delacroix 1S
have for some time been visible at Durand-Ruel's. One
is an immense affair, painted in his early youth a
Sardanapalus upon his funeral pile: it takes early
youth to attack such subjects as that. The luxurious
monarch is reclining upon his cushions on the summit
of a sort of brazen monument, and his jewels and treas-
ures and disheveled wives are heaped in confusion about
him. The subject was not easy, and Delacroix has not
solved its difficulties ; much of the picture is very bad,
even for a neophyte. But here and there a passage is
almost masterly, and the whole picture indicates the
dawning of a great imagination. One of the women, half
naked and tumbling over helpless on her face against
the couch of her lord, with her hands bound behind
her, and her golden hair shaken out with her lamenta-
tions, seems, in her young transparent rosiness, like the
work of a more delicate and more spiritual Rubens.
The other picture, painted in 1848, an "Entombment
of Christ," is one of the author's masterpieces, and is
a work of really inexpressible beauty; Delacroix is
there at his best, with his singular profundity of imag-
ination and his extraordinary harmony of color. It is
the only modern religious picture I have seen that
seemed to me painted in good faith, and I wish that
since such things are being done on such a scale it

- 72

Parisian Topics

might be bought in America. It is very dear, but it is
to be had, considering what it is, for nothing, compared
with Meissonier's "1807."

HENRY JAMES, JR.

February 19, 1876

78

8

PARIS IN ELECTION TIME

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

THE NEW SENATE M. GAMBETTA AND CLERICAL EDU-
CATION EX-MINISTER BTJFFET 5 S PERSONAL OUTLINES

M. DE GIRARDIN ON THE DUTY OF FRANCE BONAPAHTIST

FANCIES THE LATE FREDERIC LEMA1TRE

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Feb. 11. There is just at present a lull in
the political storm. The elections for the Senate came
off on the thirtieth of last month, and those for the As-
sembly occur on the twentieth of the present one. You
yourselves learn the facts in these cases a few hours
later. They were such, in the senatorial elections, as to
gratify people who feel at liberty to take, on the whole,
a cheerful view of republican institutions. There were
more Moderate Republicans elected, fewer Radicals,
and very much fewer Bonapartists, than had been
feared. The great news of the day, indeed, was the de-
feat of the Bonapartists, who muster, at the largest es-
timate, but forty Senators. The election in Paris was
of a paler hue than had seemed likely. Victor Hugo
was successful, but only on a second ballot, and Louis

74*

Paris in Election Time

Blanc 1 was beaten. The latter, however, is standing for
the Assembly, the famous M. Barodet, 2 whose election
to the Assembly just extinct produced such a scandal,
having gallantly withdrawn to make room for him. But
M. Barodet has since begun to oppose another candi-
date, and a wiser man than himself, in another arron-
dissement. How the forthcoming elections will turn out
no man can tell, and I believe the oldest political ob-
servers decline to risk any prophecies. The results on
the thirtieth of January were in a measure a surprise
they gave the Monarchists at once less to exult in and
less to raise the cry of alarm about than these gentle-
men had it may be said hoped. It may be that in this
same direction those of ten days hence will be even
better.

M. Gambetta 3 has just been making an eloquent
speech at Lille his age (he is less than forty) having
excluded him from the senator ship. It is all very rea-
sonable as well as eloquent, save in so far as it commits
the liberal program to antagonism to the new Catholic
University. 4 M. Gambetta denounces in violent terms
the admission of the Church to a share in the superior
instruction. 5 This is a point on which many sagacious
Republicans distinctly differ with him it has brought
down upon him, for instance, the animadversions of the
Journal des D6bat$ s which for some time past has been
treating him with abundant respect. To give the Church
leave to bring up emigres, as Gambetta says, within the
state, to form citizens who are no citizens, and with
whom it is a matter of conscience to plot and conspire

75 -

Parisian Sketches

against it this may be very fairly represented as sui-
cidal. Certainly there is no such cruel knot for a liberal
party to have to untie as the question how far it can
afford to appear intolerant, and the history of Repub-
licanism in France is associated with so many ugly do-
ings against the Church, that the question is peculiarly
difficult here. It should of course be settled in perfect
indifference to the ironical cries of the Church party
itself; but though M. Gambetta declares that it is a
matter with which considerations of liberty and toler-
ance have nothing to do a matter of simple self-pres-
ervation it is inevitable that some people should ask
themselves whether the remedy is not worse than the
disease. If I were a Frenchman I am inclined to think
that I should feel more at my ease in a republic in
which the Catholic party was allowed to carry on, in
competition with the Sorbonne and the College de
France, as successful and satisfactory a university as
it could, than in a republic in which it was silenced and
muzzled and forced to disseminate its instruction
through private channels. It is hard, indeed, to imagine
a Catholic university, with the full light of our cur-
rent audacity of opinion beating down upon it, proving
very dangerous. I indulged, however, just above in a
very fantastic hypothesis. Heaven forbid for simple
entertainment's sake that anyone who has the good
fortune not to be a Frenchman should become one, even
in thought, at the present hour. They are a sadly per-
plexed people, and I find the spectacle of the various
conflicting embodiments of opinion which I here and

- 76

Paris in Election Time

there encounter much, more interesting than the mo-
notonous interest of having a responsible bundle of
doctrines and sticking to it. Without at all pleading
guilty to the charge of that exaggeration of versatility
known as being of the opinion of the last speaker, I
never hear a political sympathy strongly expressed
without desiring at least to understand it to get in-
side of the speaker's mind, circumstances, and ante-
cedents. The other day a lady was talking to me of a
gentleman whom she had ceased for some time to see
he was so violent a Republican. 6 He had none but Re-
publicans at his house, and they were all horrible peo-
ple. "No French people," she added in a moment, "are
Republicans at least no one that anyone sees." This
seemed to me in its way quite sublime, and it was cer-
tainly excusable to desire to pass half an hour in a
place so warm and snug and free from uncomfortable
drafts as this lady's moral consciousness. An evening or
two later I was in a room into which M. Buffet pres-
ently entered, and a lady with whom I was talking
made me turn and look at him. "I believe," she said
in a moment, very softly and sweetly, "that M. Buffet
is the best man on earth." Certainly if you don't dis-
like the vice-president of the Council very much, you
will probably love him; but if, as an impartial ob-
server, you happen to be looking at him in the flesh,
you will probably feel a certain irritation at hearing
him spoken of tenderly. Not that he is not very well
worth turning round to look at, anywhere; but his
physiognomy expresses the beau ideal of toughness.

77

Parisian Sketches

He looks like a fine sixteenth-century print; his face,
which is full of dignity and refinement, is, as it were,
a masterly piece of wood engraving. Beneath the cut,
on a scroll, in old, quaint letters, ought to be written
obstinacy. M. Buffet's countenance exhibits this qual-
ity in truly heroic proportions ; and again, as I say, I
should have been thankful for a glimpse of the intel-
lectual economy of my companion, who found it so
sympathetic. I do not know exactly what to say of a
gentleman whom I lately encountered, and who, being
a literary critic of much eminence, had for many years
delighted me by his writings. On my asking how he felt
about the elections "Oh, it is done, this time, decid-
edly, it is done," he answered in the most mournful ac-
cents. "We are Americanizing ! Yes, it's done." And he
proceeded to affirm, with an air of dejection so pro-
found, that the republican form was fatally different
from those under which France had acquired her great-
ness, that I had not the heart to remind him of what
his phrase, under the circumstances, lacked in perfect
urbanity. I contented myself with suggesting that some
of the forms under which Prance had grown great
would make a rather ugly figure today.

I have just been looking through a new book by M.
fimile de Girardin, 7 a heavy octavo of 750 pages, en-
titled Grandeur ou Declin de la France. There is a
great deal of good sense in it, and if there were more
Frenchmen of this author's highly reasonable temper
the future of France would be less problematical. M.
de Girardin, who has always been before the public in

78

Paris in Election Time

one way or another, has been more than once called a
turncoat and a weathercock, but he has really been
quite self-consistent, for his constant principle has been
to ask for all the liberty that was possible under the
circumstances. He glories in the fact that he has never
been an "irreconcilable" ; he has accepted the situation
under every government, and exerted himself to get all

the good that was possible out of it. This long book

which is but a collection of his newspaper articles of
the last two years, and which does not contain a single
word of sterile recrimination against Germany, or even
of acrimonious allusion is an ardent appeal to his
countrymen to sink party differences in a frank ac-
ceptance of the Republic. It may be said that his dem-
onstration of the issueless character of both monarchy
and empire is more successful than any insurance he
has to offer against the perils of that straining radi-
calism which the Republic carries in its flanks ; but he
does not claim that the Republic is the millennium,
only that it is relative repose. Above all he wants things
settled upon their intrinsic merits, and not by party
considerations, and he is probably one of the few
Frenchmen who would have the courage to write, "If
such a prince is better for such an office than such a
radical, let us without hesitating take the prince ; but
if such a radical is better than such a prince, let us
take the radical. 5 ' But in truth, in France, when the
radical shall lie down with the prince, I imagine that
the millennium really will have arrived. M. de Girardin
has the further audacity to recommend forgiveness of

79

Parisian Sketches

the Prussians to deprecate, that is, in the strongest
terms, all thoughts of a revanche. He hopes for a peace-
ful one someday, by diplomatic and equitable means,
and meantime he wishes France to shake herself free
of her military incubus. He deliberately entreats her to
give up arming, and he maintains that if she does it
Germany will be enchanted to do likewise. I do not
know that he is absolutely right, but there is certainly
something to be said in that sense. I have a suspicion,
however, that M. de Girardin does not privately care
for the revanche as much as a purely ideal patriotism
would seem to recommend ; his dream is to see France
the greatest commercial and industrial country. The
sanest men have their hobbies, and that of the editor
of the France is that his country, if it only wills it, may
become a great maritime power and cover the seas with
her merchant fleets. Certainly there are things enough
under the sun France can do, if she will only set her
house in order and give her mind her admirable mind
to them. I had marked as worth quoting a couple
of extracts which M. de Girardin makes from two
Bonapartist publications, but I have space only to
allude to them. One of these volumes is by M. Georges
Lachaud, 8 and it consists of an exemplification of the
program contained in these words : "The condemnation
of the French people to gaiety in perpetuity." "Per-
suaded as we are," says M. Georges Lachaud, on be-
half of the Empire, "that a dictatorship alone, by dis-
embarrassing the French people of its grave cares, can
restore to it its lightness and its grace, we await with

80

Paris in Election Time

impatience the hour in which France will transfer to
the shoulders of a master the burden that renders her
thoughtful. Let our future master bring the 'imperial
corruption' into honor again ! And if ever his detractors
accuse him of degrading the people, and bring forward
to outrage him the old Roman device, panem et cir-
censes, on that day the chief of the state may say with
pride that he is really a great sovereign !" "The great
duty of the Empire," M. Lachaud adds and the for-
mula seems to me an exquisite trouvaille (it is worthy
to have been put into circulation by Napoleon III him-
self, who had a genius for the invention of phrases with
just that sound) "the great duty of the Empire is to
extirper le pessimisme" Delightful idea! But things
are not looking well for M. Lachaud's optimism, and
it seems as if he and his friends were more likely to be
extirpated.

In the midst of her political turmoil Paris has had
time to drop a sigh over the grave of Frederic Le~
maitre, who died at a very advanced age a fortnight
ago. The newspapers have been full of tributes to his
memory, and his death following so close upon that of
that other grotesquely aged veteran, Dejazet, has been
a piece of good luck for the anecdote mongers. I in-
cline to think, from what I have heard and read of
him, that he was one of the greatest of actors, but that
he needed a great license, a great margin, to show his
powers. The present generation had seen him for pov-
erty had repeatedly driven him back to the stage after
the chill of age had settled upon him but it did not

81

Parisian Sketches

know him. It is only our elders those who remember
Victor Hugo's Marion Delorme and Ruy Bias and
Alexandre Dumas' Anthony as new pieces that know
him. He was formed by the passionate romantic drama
that began its career in 1830. He was the actor for the
time; he inspired Victor Hugo, and Victor Hugo in-
spired him in turn. He never succeeded at the Fran^ais
he was too fantastic and audacious he played trag-
edy with a sense of humor. For an actor he grew old
very young. He reminds one of what we hear of Gar-
rick, in having had equal triumph in tragedy and com-
edy. The theater of our own day, with its relish for
small, realistic effects, produces no more actors of those
heroic proportions. The nearest approach to them is
perhaps to be found in Got 9 at the Theatre Fran9ais,
who has an element of high fantasy, as those who have
seen him in the curious revival of the medieval farce
of Maitre Patelin must remember. But Got is on the
whole really a philosophic actor, and Frederic Le-
maitre was an imaginative one. The ideal actor now-
adays the actor formed by Sardou and Dumas fils
and Feuillet is Worms of the Gymnase, who renders
prose, not verse, and whose minute and exquisite strokes
are like a masterly etching. But Frederic Lemaitre,
as we see him in his legende, is like a huge, fantastic
shadow, a moving silhouette, projected duskily against
the wall from a glowing fire. The fire is the "romantic"
movement of 1830.

H. JAMES, JR.

March 4, 1876

- 82

9

PAKISTAN AFFAIRS

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

THE REPUBLIC IN THE HANDS OF REPUBLICANS RAPID

SUCCESSION OP POLITICAL, EVENTS M. GAMBETTA ? S

SAGACITY DUMAS* NEW PLAY, U L 5 ETRANGERE 5 ' MERITS

AND DEMERITS OF THE PERFORMANCE THE CARNIVAL

IN PARIS

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT or THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, Feb. 28, 1876. That a large Republican
majority has been returned to the new Assembly, that
the Bonapartists have been (to all present appearance)
hopelessly beaten, that M. Buff et, in his appeal to four
electoral districts, has failed with a completeness which
leaves nothing to be desired, that the said M. Buffet
has sent in his resignation as vice-president of the
Council of Ministers, and that Marshal MacMahon has
accepted it, that the Conservatives in general, and
timid people in particular, profess themselves terribly
frightened, and that in fact the Funds have gone down,
and are staying down all this, by the time these lines
reach you, will have become an old story, and will pos-
sibly have been superseded by events even more thrill-

Parisian Sketches

ing. For the moment, however, here, this is thrilling
enough even for those who see no reason for being
frightened except a deliberate preference for the tragic
or pathetic state of mind. In the defeat of M. Buffet in
particular, by the four constituencies to which he had
presented himself, there has been something singularly
complete and symmetrical something, as I have seen
it well observed, of that quality which we attribute to
providential interposition. It is really a theme for the
moralist. M. Buffet, for the present, retires to private
life. When he emerges again, as a man of his tenacious
instincts inevitably must, how will it stand with the Re-
public? Not so ill doubtless as the frightened people
insist upon believing, nor so well perhaps as those who
pin their faith upon the small radical leaven of the new
Republican majority would fain proclaim on the house-
tops. Without giving up everything for lost, or taking
the fall of the Rentes too much to heart, or insisting
to gagner la frontiere if one has time, as one of the
characters in Ufitrangere says it may be affirmed
that the situation is as serious as it has been for many
a day. But it is serious in a good and healthy sense.
The Republic is now for the first time in Republican
hands, and it remains to be seen what they will make
of it. The day of speeches and promises and generali-
ties is over, and the day of political conduct has come.
It entails a great responsibility, and it will be interest-
ing to see how the party of M. Gambetta meet the oc-
casion. In so far as they are the party of M. Gambetta
the prospect is fair enough, for the conduct of their

Parisian Affairs

leader during the late campaign has been distinguished
by moderation, tact, and extreme political sense. His
split with the pure Radicals is now complete, and if he
gets the start of them in the coming session, as there
is no good reason why he should not, they will have
lost their power to compromise him. His enemies affirm
that he will throw off the mask and show himself as red
as the reddest. I doubt it; he has been at too much
trouble to put the mask on, and he has learned to wear
it too well. He would want, if nothing else, to reap the
crop of his discomfort. In the present situation of the
Republican party there is certainly something inspir-
ing if they will understand it understand that they
have just prejudices and damning associations to over-
come, that the presumption is fairly enough against
them, and that they are exceptionally bound to mod-
eration, tact, and patience. Some people despair of
their doing anything of the sort, others hope they will,
others go so far as to believe they will. With a very
little encouragement I shall feel like passing from the
second to the third category. We shall not get that
encouragement, however, from hearing Victor Hugo,
as soon as the Senate opens, present a request for a
universal amnesty. This performance will be a perfect
specimen of the things which, under the circumstances,
the new majority must on no account do.

If it is true that the country is going to the bad, and
that the celebrated "era of revolutions" is again to
open, people are beguiling the interval in such fashion
as they may. A convenient sedative to suspense is found

85

Parisian Sketches

to be an evening at the Theatre Fran9ais, where they
are now playing Alexandre Dumas' long-expected
drama UEtrangere. Besides your evening, in this case
you can get plenty to talk about afterward. The pro-
duction of this piece has been the event of the winter.
Besides its intrinsic importance, there were several ac-
cessory reasons for its attracting attention. It is the
first play (if I am not mistaken) that Dumas has pro-
duced since his election to the Academy, as well as the
first that he has presented to the Theatre Fran9ais.
The curiosity of the public, moreover, had been very
skillfully stimulated, and the last rehearsal of the play
had all the honors of a first representation. Ufitran-
gere, after all, has been but a moderate success
though, certainly, many a poor playwright would be
enchanted that "moderation" should deal out his lau-
rels and his percentage in this particular fashion. The
great theater is crowded, and for the least little or-
chestra chairs you have to apply a week in advance.
Nevertheless, the play is pronounced indifferent by
some people, and shockingly bad by others. No one,
as far as I have observed, has had the originality to
call it good. I happened to hear it discussed, a few days
since, among several gentlemen who are more or less
of the same guild as its author, and it was as pretty
a cutting up as one could desire to see. 1 The general
verdict was that Alexandre Dumas has so much wind
in his sails (from former successes) that he will float
safely across his present shallows, but that his decline
(since decline it is) will be cumulative; that another

86

Parisian Affairs

piece as bad as UEtrangere will have much worse luck,
and that the more gentle the public has been for the
author hitherto, the more pitiless it will be when he
begins to sink. Has he already begun to sink? I con-
fess that L'fitmngere strikes me as a rather desperate
piece of floundering in the dramatic sea. It is a long
story, and I cannot pretend to relate it in detail. Suffice
it that the Foreigner who gives its title to the piece,
and who is played by that very interesting actress,
Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, 2 is a daughter of our own
democracy, Mrs. Clarkson by name. She explains, in
the second act, by a mortal harangue the longest, by
the watch, I have ever listened to that she is the
daughter of a mulatto slave girl and a Carolinian
planter. As she expresses it herself, "My mother was
pretty: he remarked her; I was born of the remark."
Mrs. Clarkson, however, has next to nothing to do with
the action of the play, and she is the least successful
figure that the author has ever drawn. Why she should
be an American, why she should have Negro blood, why
she should be the implacable demon that she is repre-
sented, why she should deliver the melodramatic and
interminable tirade I have mentioned, why she should
come in, why she should go out, why, in short, she
should exist all this is the perfection of mystery. She
is like the heroine of an old-fashioned drama of the
Boulevard du Crime who has strayed unwittingly into
a literary work, in which she, is out of time with all her
companions. She is, on Dumas' part, an incredible error
of taste. It must be confessed, however, that her en-

87 *

Parisian Sketches

trance into the play has a masterly effectiveness. The
whole first act indeed is an excellent start, though the
goal is never really reached. As one of the characters
says, we are en pleine decomposition sociale. The
Duchess de Sept-Monts is giving a charity ball, and
the circle of her particular intimates is collected about
her in one of her apartments. The lady in question has
been sold by her father, a retired tradesman of im-
mense fortune, to a penniless and exhausted little rake,
who, driven to bay by his creditors, has been delighted
to raise money on his ducal title by the simple expedient
of matrimony. Her father and her husband are present,
and the conversation alights upon Mrs. Clarkson, the
mysterious American, her beauty, her diamonds, her
sinister reputation, her innumerable conquests, and her
total absence of female friends. No respectable woman
has ever entered her house or has ever received her. It
so happens that the Duchess's father, her husband and
her lover are all entangled in Mrs. Clarkson's toils, and
these facts more or less explicitly transpire. The bale-
ful beauty is moreover even now on the premises ; she
has been seen in the garden among the visitors present
by right of having purchased their ticket seen on the
arm of the Duchess's lover (a lover who is as yet, I
hasten to add, sincerely platonic). Abruptly the Duch-
ess is approached by a servant with a card, which she
reads in deep agitation. She writes a few words on an-
other card and gives it to the footman; he goes off
with it, and then she reads aloud to the company the
contents of the first missive. Mrs. Clarkson requests

88

Parisian Affairs

permission to be admitted to the salon in which the
Duchess sits apart with her intimates, there to receive
from the Duchess's own hands a cup of tea. In com-
pensation, she offers to pay for her cup of tea the sum
of 25,000 francs, which the Duchess will make over to
the charity for which the ball has been given. At the
revelation of this audacity the little circle is aghast,
and demands with a single voice what the Duchess has
answered. The Duchess has answered that Mrs. Clark-
son may be admitted if one of the gentlemen actually
about the hostess will go out, offer his arm, and con-
duct her into the ducal presence. There is a particular
silence half-a-dozen gentlemen are present, but not
one of them moves. Finally the shaky, unclean little
Duke himself (admirably played by Coquelin) 8 stands
forth and declares that he will play the gallant part.
The announcement makes a great sensation, for it is
his presumed mistress that he proposes to introduce
to his wife. He departs and shortly afterward returns,
bearing Mrs. Clarkson on his arm, in all the effective-
ness of the strange physiognomy and the fantastic
toilet of yellow and black which Mme. Sarah Bernhardt
has conferred upon her. "A cup !" shouts the outraged
Duchess, sticking to her bargain and nothing but her
bargain. I must not relate what follows. The real hero-
ine of the play is Mile. Croizette,* who played the
Duchess with a great deal of skill and with all that
strangely meretricious charm for which she is re-
nowned. She has one really magnificent scene a scene
in which the ill-used (but on her own side by no means

89

Parisian Sketches

unpeccant) heroine, the cup of whose disgust at her
husband's turpitude is full, pours it all forth in rage
and scorn upon his ignoble head. This is nature caught
in the act Mile. Croizette's cries and gestures, the
passionate reality of her imprecations, electrify the
house. The author makes his duchess say things which
have never before been said on the stage, but the artis-
tic good faith of the actress carries them off.

I should mention that there is also a Mr. Clarkson
in the play a gentleman engaged in gold-washing in
Utah, while his wife drinks tea at five thousand dollars
the spoonful in Paris. Half the merit of this figure is
with Febvre, 5 who represents it, and who, in particular,
has dressed his Yankee with great felicity quite in the
occidental taste, and yet without the least exaggera-
tion. On the whole, as I have said, L'fitrangere has
been a disappointment, and it is unquestionably a very
unsatisfactory piece of work for so clever a man as
Dumas. It hangs very loosely together, and the story
is both extremely improbable and profoundly dis-
agreeable. Disagreeable, above all, for there is not a
person in the play who is not, in one way or another,
misbehaving grossly. Everyone is in the wrong, and
the author most of all. And then his drama is saturated
with that aroma of bad company and loose living which
is the distinctive sign of M. Dumas' muse. This lady is
afflicted with a congenital want of perception of cer-
tain rudimentary differences between the possible, for
decent people, and the impossible. She has also on this
occasion abused her characteristic privilege of indulg-

90

Parisian Affairs

ing in pretentious tirades of the would-be philosophic
order explaining that love is physics and marriage
is chemistry, &c.

It appears that for a number of weeks past we have
been in Carnival. I confess that I never suspected it,
and, by way of making up my arrears of perception
of the subject, I went last night to the masked ball of
the Opera. This was the only ball that the Opera, in
its present gorgeous domicile, has offered. Half a
dozen used to be given annually in the old opera house,
but the present establishment considers this vulgar
profusion beneath its dignity. It seems to me quite
right, for, without making too much of the merits of
the present structure, one may affirm that they are at
least of a higher order than the laborious gambols of
the rabble to show, last night, the privilege of dancing
was by common consent surrendered. The crowd of
spectators was enormous, but the maskers and dancers
were woefully seedy and shabby. The bea/ux jours of
masked revelry in Paris are evidently over. Peace to
their ashes ! The new Opera, arranged for the purpose
as the French know how to arrange such things, made
a superb ballroom, and Strauss's orchestra, on its im-
mense platform, thundered away with an impressive-
ness which might have made the antics of dancers a
trifle less dingy seem heroic. Behind the open stage the
foyer de la danse was exhibited in a very effective man-
ner. It is a kind of huge rococo boudoir, ornamented
with medallions bearing portraits of all the great mis-
tresses of the pirouette, from the Camargo to Carlotta

91

Parisian Sketches

Grisi. 6 It was filled with plants and grassy banks,
among which you might fancy the ghosts of these de-
parted sylphs coming down in their short-skirted
shrouds to execute a spectral ballet, and at its back
was a great wall of plate glass, which reflected the
whole hall and doubled its extent. This was a good deal
more than enough, however, for a masked ball at a
theater begets, as Hamlet says, a pestilent congrega-
tion of vapors. As I came away betimes, and saw the
great mounted cuirassiers stationed in the darkness
along the approaches, they seemed in their immobility
to have something refreshingly severe and monumental.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
March 25, 1876

10

PARISIAN TOPICS

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

THE RECEPTION OF JOHN LEMOINNE AT THE ACADEMY
HIS CHARACTERISTICS AS A JOURNALIST THE VARI-
ABLE MERITS OF ACADEMICIANS M. GEROME ? S "CHAR-

IOT RACE 55 PRESIDENT LINCOLN AND STONEWALL JACK-
SON DRAMATIZED VICTOR TISSOT ON THE PRUSSIANS

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, March 10. Except [for] the assembling of
the Senate and the Chamber I can think of no event
of importance of recent occurrence here save the re-
ception of M. John Lemoinne * at the Academy, which
took place a week since. M. John Lemoinne is the
eminent journalist the bright particular star of the
Debats and journalism has received in his person at
the hands of the Academy a compliment of which, if
she particularly desires to, she may be proud. It was
a proud day at least for the Journal des Debats. John
Lemoinne replaces Jules Janin, 2 who spent forty years
in the "basement," as they call it, of that honorable
sheet turned off every Monday during that period
the dramatic f euilleton which graces the bottom of its

Parisian Sketches

otherwise somewhat austere first two pages. He pro-
nounced the customary eulogy of his departed con-
frere, and M. Cavillier-Fleury replied to him at very
great length with a eulogy of himself, M. Cavillier-
Fleury being the principal literary critic of the Jour-
nal des Depots. It was therefore, for this journal, quite
a fete de famUle. M. John Lemoinne is a very clever
man; he possesses in perfection the French "art of
saying," and if the Academy was designed simply to
represent good writing, he has an eminent claim to a
place in it. (It is singular, by the way, that M. John
Lemoinne should, as a writer, be of so pure a French
strain. He was born in England, and, in a measure,
educated there, and he speaks our language irreproach-
ably.) If, however, to reward good thinking and good
feeling is a part of the Academy's mission, 3 M. Le-
moinne's right of entrance does not seem so unques-
tionable. Brilliant, incisive, and trenchant as he always
is, I have never been able to resist the feeling that there
is something very dry and sterile in his political criti-
cism. To say acrimonious and contemptuous things in
a masterly manner appears to be the sum of his am-
bition. He is essentially what the French call a frondeur
a faultfinder; his criticism is always restrictive and
denunciatory, never suggestive or inspiring, and he
lacks supremely Matthew Arnold's famous requisite of
"sweetness." This is the greater pity, as he has evi-
dently plenty of "light." He seems to proceed by fits
of irritation. He appears in the DSbats not daily, but
at intervals; suddenly darts forth, whirling his sling

94

Parisian Topics

and letting fly his sharp flints. When he has quite dark-
ened the air with them he retires to his tent feeling
better himself for the time, I hope to await a fresh
re-exasperation of his wrath. It is all nervous, capri-
cious, splenetic. M. John Lemoinne's chief stock in
trade is his peculiarly insidious hatred of England,
and, indeed, during the past winter, exciting as the
political situation has been, it is only the perfidy of
Albion that has been able to rouse him to utterance.
At the time of the purchase of the Khedive's shares he
came out, as the phrase is, very strong, and produced
two or three articles in which the expression of wither-
ing enmity could not have been surpassed. England,
for M. Lemoinne, is a shabby country at the best, but
her unpardonable sin was her failure to come to the
rescue of France when the latter was bleeding to death
in the grip of Prussia her "standing watching us
stretched on the earth like gladiators." And yet even
this is not sufficient to account for such a perennial
freshness of hostility. The reader cannot rid himself
of a feeling that M. John Lemoinne is avenging a per-
sonal injury; where does the shoe pinch, he wonders;
whom has he in his mind a qui en veut-il? These con-
jectures are probably fantastic, and they are certainly
vain.

M. LEMOINNE AND THE ACADEMY *

The fact remains, however, that M. Lemoinne's Eng-
land is very much an affair of his imagination; it is,
as the London Times said the other day, an article de

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Paris. I may add that the sturdiest Anglo-Saxon must
have had last week a kindly feeling for the new Acade-
mician, in seeing him undertake the heroic task of
eulogizing (I was going to say apologizing for) Jules
Janin. M. John Lemoinne did his best, but unless I
am very much mistaken one hears the creaking of the
pump. There have been many strange Academicians,
but I think there has been none quite so strange as the
dramatic critic of the Debats. There have been Acade-
micians whose literary titles were of the slenderest, and
who were admitted for reasons of state thinly dis-
guised motives of convenience and propriety; there
have been heaven knows ! dull, dreary, insipid Acad-
emicians, authors of classical, respectable, unreadable
prose and verse. There have also been flimsy and futile
Academicians, whose literature was of a vaporous and
imponderable sort. But there was none before M. Jules
Janin who had erected futility into a system and raised
flimsiness to a fine art.

There are writers in whom mannerism has gone very
far, but there are none in whom it has become the all
in all to the same degree as in Janin. His mannerism
in his later years attained the proportions of a mon-
strosity. Such a shuffling away of substance, such a
juggling with thought, partook really of the nature
of the magical. He was the great master of the type
of criticism that speaks of everything but the subject,
and that spins its phrases faster in proportion as it has
less and less to say. Janin ended very early by having

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Parisian Topics

nothing in life to say, and the rattle and clatter he
made in saying it was to all healthy intellectual men
the most intolerable noise conceivable. If the Academy
has any meaning, one would say that its meaning
should be exactly that its honors are not for writers
of the Janin family. But has the Academy any mean-
ing? Two or three incidents have lately occurred which
make the inquiry proper. The most striking was cer-
tainly the admission among the sacred party, last
spring, of Alexandre Dumas fils. M. Dumas is su-
premely clever, and he has composed dramas which it
is impossible, on certain sides, too highly to admire;
but it seems to me that he has about as much business
in the Academy as in the Cabinet of the Emperor of
China. He is a man with a fixed idea a monomaniac.
He can see nothing in life but the "unfortunate"
woman ; she is the pivot of his imagination all his in-
spiration, his allusions and metaphors are drawn from
her. If the Academy were an intellectual asylum, with
wards, cells, and keepers, M. Dumas might very well
appeal to its hospitality ; but as it is, there is something
grotesque in his presence there. The prime duty of the
Academy ought to be to distinguish between the
cracked vessel and the sound; 5 and it seems to me that
if she had observed this duty, she would have said to
Jules Janin and Alexandre Dumas, alike (dissimilar
in talent as they are), that they were welcome to be
clever, and popular, and brilliant, but that they were
made of precisely the stuff she could not wear they

97

Parisian Sketches

were deformed, erratic, mistaken. "Here is a certain
straight line," she should have said, "you and I can
never be on the same side of it."

ME. STEWART'S ART PURCHASE

I saw a few days since a large picture lately finished
by M. Gerome * for the gentleman in New York whom
I mentioned some time since as the purchaser of Meis-
sonier's "1807," and such reasons as made it opportune
to allude to that work apply in the present case. They
apply, however, with less force, for in Gerome's "Char-
iot Race" (as I suppose the picture is called), Mr.
A. T. Stewart has made a less brilliant acquisition. On
the other hand, the picture is not on exhibition. It is
a capital example of the artist's archaeological skill
though it would require a specialist to determine, on
this line, its triumphs and its shortcomings. What the
ordinary observer sees is that the painter has mastered
a vast amount of curious detail, and after all, unless
the ghost of some old Roman man about town comes
back for the purpose, I do not see who is to prove that
M, Gerome's ingenious reconstruction is either a good
likeness of the actual scene or a poor one. I believe that
the eminent architect, M. Viollet-le-Duc (who, by the
way, though lavishly patronized by the Empire, has
lately come out as a thoroughgoing radical), worked
with the painter in Rome at the plan of the picture.
It represents what I take to be the Circus Maximus,
on a day of high festivity ; behind rise the towers, pal-

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Parisian Topics

aces, and terraces of the Palatine, and into the distance
stretches away the vast ellipse of the arena. The spec-
tators are embanked above it in. high, steep, parti-col-
ored slopes, the sunshine pouring over them or over
those that we see and touching the reds and yellows
of their dresses into gaudiness. Down the center of
the circus runs a long, narrow platform, covered with
brazen monuments and columns, and making at each
extremity the corner which the chariots are to turn.
They have reached the end which is presented to the
spectators of the picture, and they are in the act of
rounding the brazen cape, from which a great por-
phyry column rises like a lighthouse. They are eight
in number as one distinguishes them among their
clouds of dust and each has three horses abreast. It
is a fierce mMee of beasts, men, and wheels ; the strug-
gle and confusion are powerfully expressed, and the
horses and chariots painted with that hard, consum-
mate finish characteristic of the author. The coloring
of the picture, meanwhile, is not that to which Gerome
has accustomed us ; it has a certain anomalous crudity
and an abuse of bricklike tones. It is evident, however,
that this is perfectly calculated. The painter has wished
to represent the full glare of sunshine on bedizened and
gilded surfaces, on stained and painted walls, and on
garments in which the mingled and complex tones of
the modern costume were unknown. He has an immense
expanse of functionaries in one section of the auditory
senators possibly draped in pure vermilion.

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Parisian Sketches

AN AMERICAK MELODRAMA

The adventurous American in Paris at the present
moment is deriving much entertainment from going to
see the highly successful melodrama of the Chevaliers
de la Patrie, at the Theatre Historique. I say "adven-
turous," because the theater in question is very far off,
and, though of splendid aspect and proportion, much
frequented by that class of amateurs who find the sus-
pense of the entr'actes intolerable without the beguile-
ment of an orange. The drama in question treats
bravely of the American civil war, and the "chevaliers"
from whom it takes its name are Abraham Lincoln and
Stonewall Jackson. It is in no less than eight acts, but
I sat to the end, for it is a most exhilarating affair.
The author, one M. Delpit, 7 is, I believe, by birth a
Louisianian. He evidently "knows better," but he
knows that his audience does not, and he gives them
their money's worth of local color. In the first act the
greater part of the dramatis personae are assembled
on a steamboat on the Potomac, and they all come to
the side of the vessel and narrate their histories to the
audience. Meanwhile the steamboat is racing with a
craft of an opposition line, and the captain has for-
mally announced that his boat must win the race or
blow up. One or other of the boilers must burst they
can only hope it will be the other. The passengers ex-
claim in chorus, "All right !" and await further devel-
opments. At last the rival steamboat comes alongside,
and, after a moment of painful suspense, explodes.

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Parisian Topics

"It's the other !" cry the passengers, and continue their
promenade on the deck. The sequel is worthy of this
beginning, but I cannot begin to unweave its tangled
web. Abraham Lincoln is ever administering justice in
one of the saloons of the White House, like a primitive
chieftain under the spreading oak. The White House,
indeed, appears to open out in the rear into the forest
primeval. The scene is of course in a high degree farci-
cal, but the actor who represents Mr. Lincoln has suc-
ceeded in making up his head into a very tolerable
likeness of the original. Then we are transported to the
southern army, in which two gallant young Frenchmen
have come to seek commissions, and [are] introduced
to Stonewall Jackson and the famous cavalry chieftain,
Stuart. This, of course, furnishes the opportunity for
a very dramatic contrast Jackson sitting reading the
Bible on one side of the stage, Stuart draining his glass
on the other, and the southern army displayed in the
background. Stuart proposes to give a fete in the eve-
ning, but Jackson piously protests. Stuart, however,
insists. Jackson goes off in sorrow, if not in anger, and
the fete consisting of a dozen Negro minstrels and as
many ballet girls is promptly put forward. It is in-
terrupted, however, by the return of Jackson on a
litter, fresh from the field of battle, and mortally
wounded. During the fete a battle has been raging,
at which Stuart's attendance appears to have been
deemed superfluous. Jackson, in his death agony, struts
and stamps about the stage, and requests the two
French officers to repair straightway to Washington

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Parisian Sketches

and kidnap Mr. Lincoln. This they proceed to do in
the next act ; but Wilkes Booth whose name has been
altered by the censorship comes very near being be-
forehand with them. They are all baffled, however, by
the sublimity of Mr. Lincoln's conversation, and the
curtain falls upon the reunion of the French officers
and their sweethearts in one of the parlors of the White
House, where the President fraternally blesses them.
There is a certain analogy between this brave bur-
lesque and the lively travesty of actual things pre-
sented in M. Victor Tissot's 8 second volume on his ad-
ventures in Germany. The book has been out but a few
days, and it is already in its eighth edition. M. Victor
Tissot is the author of the Voyage au Pays des Mil-
liards, which was published a few months since, and is
now in its twenty-second edition. He at present gives
a sequel, Les Prussiens en Attemagne, which I suppose
will gain the same distinction as its predecessor that
of being placed under an interdict in Berlin. This last
circumstance raises the one presumption in favor of
M. Tissot's veracity. He is exceedingly clever, admi-
rably observant, and his Teutophobia, as an exhibition
of vivacity and energy, is really very fine. But, like M.
Lemoinne's England, his Germany is quite an article
de Paris. I heard a gentleman of Germanic sympathies 9
characterize an impertinent fable the other day as du
Tissot tout pur, and certainly M. Tissot's reader
largely repunctuates his pages with interrogation
marks. He should remember the proverb that he who

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Parisian Topics

wishes to prove too much proves nothing. The French,
they say, are beginning to study Germany, but they
had better not take M. Tissot's volumes for their text-
books.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
April 1, 1876

103

11

ART AND LETTERS IN PARIS

Letter -from Henry James, Jr.

THE PARISIAN ART MARKET DECAMPS 5 DISTINCTIVE

MERITS MARILHAT'S PAINTINGS ORIENTAL SKETCHES

ABUNDANT MEISSONIER 3 S "READER" THE FLOODS IN

THE SEINE CURRENT LITERATURE

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, March 21. In default of any topic with a
high interest of what the French call "actuality," there
is something to say today about pictures. I have re-
cently seen a good many; but heaven forbid I should
speak of them all! I have seen several, however, the
reappearance of which in the art market is worth com-
memorating, and may interest those people at least
who keep a record of such matters. Two important
collections of French pictures, formed many years ago
in Holland, are about to be dispersed in consequence
of the death of their owners, and have of course been
sent to Paris to be disposed of. This operation is to
take place a month hence at the Hotel Drouot, and
meanwhile one seems to hear the meditative rattle of
coin in the sidepockets of amateurs not compelled, like

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Art and Letters in Paris

most newspaper correspondents, to be purely platonic.
I had the pleasure, the other day, of having an an-
ticipatory view of these two collections, which are not
yet on exhibition, and it yielded me much entertain-
ment. Part of the entertainment was perhaps independ-
ent of the rigidly intrinsic merit of Meissonier and De-
camps, 1 and consisted in lounging upon an ottoman
in a quiet room in an establishment in which the effec-
tive presentation of works of art has itself been raised
to a fine art, and seeing the gems of the series I men-
tion pluciked forth from an adjoining place of de-
posit and arrayed before me in skillful juxtaposition.
They certainly order this matter better in France than
anywhere in the world. A catalogue of each of the col-
lections of which I speak has been put forward, illus-
trated by etchings from eminent hands, many of which
are admirable so much so that people of modest as-
pirations, possessing the catalogue, may almost con-
sole themselves for being unlikely ever to possess any
of the works it describes. Among these there are two
or three charming Decamps and a couple of small but
superlative Meissoniers. Decamps is a painter of whom
I never tire, and one of the very few French artists in
whom, in the long run, one finds it possible to take a
sentimental pleasure, counting Delacroix, Millet, and
Rousseau 2 as the others. He is not so pure an original
as they, but like them he has an element of magic, of
independence of fancy the precious something that
gives its highest value to a work of art that can be
learned in no school, and in its absence replaced by

105

Parisian Sketches

no amount of practice. If practice could give it, Meis-
sonier, Gerome, and two or three of their supremely
clever confreres ought to be rich in it ; but in fact these
gentlemen only prove that it is possible to go a good
way without it. One of the specimens of Decamps is a
small picture of a little peasant girl sitting under a
tree in springtime, when the leaves above her are yet
sparse, but the grass around her thick-strewn with
anemones, and thrusting a great slice of the bread and
butter with which she is besmearing her infant lips at
a little white kid, who stands beside her. The subject
is not heroic, and to call the scene pastoral, even, seems
an exaggeration of its pretensions. But it is truly ex-
quisite, and the landscape, beyond the figures, which
are immediately in front, and in shadow, melts away
into soft Italian crags and undulations, and glows with
silver light. No painter plays with effects of light so
delicately, and on the whole so unerringly, as Decamps.
He shrinks from none of the atmospheric mysteries and
complexities. He may easily be accused, of course, of
playing too much, and be reminded that, according to
the canons which have come into fashion of recent
years, to play in a picture, to disport oneself, dissiper,
is very nearly as wicked as to play on a Sunday that
a picture is indeed a kind of concentrated Sunday, a
transported battleground of right and wrong, a deadly,
solemn, and responsible thing. He will have, however,
always, even in his most criminal aberrations, a good
many admirers among the people who cannot help be-
lieving that the great charm of art is in its being a

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Art and Letters in Paris

change from life, and not a still narrower consciousness
of it, and who, even if he were a less brilliant genius,
would prize in Decamps his strong expression of this
sentiment. Another example of the same painter is a
picture of a couple of Italian pifferari, piping before
an image of the Madonna, in the close, hot streets of
some little southern city. It is a masterpiece as regards
the treatment of reflected lights, for there are none
other. The yellow afternoon sunshine, confined till it
grows thick, as it were, between walls of moldering
travertine reflected upon one, and thence reflected back
upon another, and broken and mixed with vague,
brown shadows, is here represented with admirable
verity. Anyone who has walked in the streets of small
Italian towns late in the long summer days will par-
ticularly relish this little picture. Such an observer will
seem to feel the warm, dead air again, and in the places
on which his eyes lingered, all the mellow the almost
golden dreariness.

A painter whom I always meet with pleasure, though
unfortunately one meets him but seldom, as he died
many years since, prematurely, before the list of his
works had grown long, is Marilhat, the precursor of
the innumerable tribe of clever Frenchmen who during
the last twenty years have "exploited" the Orient. I
do not know what Marilhat 3 would have been doing
now if he had lived to our own day ; but coining when
he did, and stopping when he did, he has a charm of
which we must give him all the credit. It is an unhappy
thing in France, that as soon as an individual makes

107

Parisian Sketches

a hit, in a certain line, in any of the arts, he imme-
diately, and in spite of himself, founds a school calls
into activity a multitude of other persons who forth-
with proceed to "do" that particular thing ; to manu-
facture it, to elaborate the apparatus and perfect the
system, so that it may be turned off in large quantities.
The discovery by Delacroix and Decamps, forty years
ago, that the bazaars of Cairo and Constantinople af-
forded a harvest of picturesque subjects is an excel-
lent case in point. It took a little while for the move-
ment to spread, and Marilhat, coining first, at his
leisure, is fresh, charming, and sincere. Marilhat's nat-
ural refinement, his agreeable fancy, his simple and
skillful touch, are capitally illustrated in an extremely
beautiful picture which I the other day had before
me a great group of cedars perched on a huge, pic-
turesque embankment of masonry, above a fountain,
with a group of camel drivers and their beasts resting
in the shade. It is the old East the East of forty years
ago, before the era of steamboats on the Nile and the
British purchase of the Khedive's shares ; 4 and there
is in particular a certain old white-walled castle in the
middle distance, which, with its faint gleams and its
vague shadows, is alone, in vulgar parlance, worth the
price of the picture. But after Marilhat came the troop
among whom Gerome is easily chief, and who have ran-
sacked and rifled the oriental world of the uttermost
vestige of its mystery, The trick has been learned, the
recipe has been copied, passed through ten thousand
hands. For some people the absolutely mechanical

108

Art and Letters in Paris

cleverness of Gerome has produced, as regards the
East, a complete disenchantment. The worst of all this
in France is that the secondary people, the imitators,
the school, the queue, are generally so odiously clever
that to a certain extent they challenge comparison with
their betters.

The collections I have mentioned contain two extraor-
dinary little pictures by Meissonier minute master-
pieces each, I did not rank Meissonier just now among
the French painters I much care for ; but there is none
we much more greatly admire. One of the diminutive
panels I mention represents a couple of medieval Lands-
knechts a battered and grizzled old veteran, seated
against a wall, and a companion standing beside him.
This younger man, with his broad, round, densely-
curled head, his widely divided eyes, his short, narrow
beard, his hard, good-humored face, the perfection of
the choice of his type as an adjunct to a dented cuirass
and a pair of faded red velvet sleeves, is beyond all
praise. He is as solid and complete as if we had heard
him whistling while he polished his battered breast-
plate. An even greater triumph is the other picture,
which is famous under the title of "The Reader." Ah !
what a reader! He is a man of forty, clad in a red
velvet gown of the sixteenth century, sitting upright
in a shallow armchair, which supports his elbows, and
holding open, with the most delicate and sympathetic
fingers, a goodly little volume of the period, upon
which his intelligent brow is bent with a slight, pleasur-
able contraction, while his bearded lips are vaguely

109

Parisian Sketches

pushed forward. Here is ranch in little, if there ever
was life, thought, history, dignity, culture, all con-
densed into the expression of a figure which you need
a magnifying glass to look at properly. There could
not be more of it if it were six feet high, and we could
not believe more thoroughly in his admirable red velvet
gown (it is hard to think that something fine did not
pass out of human character when gentlemen used to
wear such garments) if we had been his valet de cham-
bre, and helped him to put it on. The head is to some
extent a portrait of the artist.

Of the various pictures which I saw in combination
with these, I have left myself no space to speak ; well-
chosen specimens as they each were, they formed a
very honorable and brilliant summary of the French
school exclusive of its landscapists. There were, in
particular, some admirable examples of the cattle-
painter BrascassaV who is little known in America,
but who seems to me to handle his bulls and oxen in
a much grander fashion than Rosa Bonheur. He has
a striking resemblance to Paul Potter. 6 Let me com-
memorate also a couple of pictures by a young man
named Baillet, 7 a pupil of Breton, the painter of fish-
wives and harvest women, half bovine, half statuesque.
M. Baillet is almost as good as his master, and the day
he becomes quite as good he will be better. One of the
subjects of which I speak a group of peasant women
washing clothes in some fresh-water pools near the sea,
in the early twilight is a very noble performance, and
displays a union of imagination and self-control which

Art and Letters in Paris

speaks well for the artist's future. It may be expected
to make an impression in the forthcoming Salon. I can
also not deny myself the satisfaction of turning a com-
pliment to a young Italian painter, Boldini 8 by name,
for an admirable work to which, in my extreme relish
for it, I lately paid more than one visit. (The picture
in question, I must hasten to add, is, like others to
which I have had the honor of alluding, the property
of Mr. A, T. Stewart. I feel, in this connection, like
the cat in the fairy tale, pointing out the possessions
of the Marquis of Carabas.) My compliment to M.
Boldini, to be in keeping, should be flowery and cere-
monious, like the diction of the last century. He is the
most skillful among the little band of Italian painters
which has come into being within a few years past, with
powder and brocade, rococo fountains, sedan chairs,
and poodles for their especial inspiration. It is a sort
of neo-Watteau movement, and its obvious reproach
is that of triviality. Its equally obvious charm is that
it is irresistibly entertaining ; it has a naivete, a good
faith, a light jocularity quite distinct from the stale,
skeptical cleverness which characterizes so much French
art. M. Boldini's picture represents a corner of the
park at Versailles under Louis XVI. A sedan chair
containing a fine lady, escorted by several fops and
elegantes, has been deposited, while the carriers stand
resting, beneath a great wall of horse chestnut trees.
Nearby is a fountain and a couple of statues, and
where the horse chestnuts stop a broad cedar spreads
itself into the brilliant summer light. The figures are

Parisian Sketches

very small they belong to the class of what the French
call little bonshommes; but their animation, expressive-
ness, and grace, the shimmer of their brocades and vel-
vets, the gleam of their tense silk stockings, the way
they hollow their backs and turn out their toes, are
all extraordinary and delightful. The artist has a real
divination of the costume of the time and the way it
must have been worn. His great triumph here, however,
has been his landscape his great mass of verdure, and
his dazzling, almost blinding summer light. This is so
intense that in spite of its immense quantity of green,
the picture is almost too white. But as a representation
of objects shining and glowing in the open air, and as
an almost childishly irreflective piece of fantasy, the
work is a singular success.

In saying that there were just now no Parisian "ac-
tualities" of the first importance, I may seem to have
slighted the overflow of the Seine, which has lately
given Paris and its neighborhood plenty to talk about.
The waters, moreover, are now fast subsiding, and the
subject is a painful one, owing to the suffering and in-
jury inflicted upon the poor people who form almost
exclusively the population of the flooded quarters. Both
up and down the river, outside of the center of Paris,
everything habitable has been knee-deep in the water.
I took a long walk the other night along the quays,
past Notre Dame and the Jardin des Plantes, to see the
immersion of Bercy. Since 1848 the river had not been
so high, but its present condition, like a great many
painful and cruel things, was extremely picturesque.

* 112*

Art and Letters in Paris

In the city it has been for a fortnight as big as a young
Mississippi doubling its apparent breadth from quay
to quay, hiding the arches of the bridges up to the key-
stone, lifting up its barges and floating baths and
swimming schools into unprecedented intimacy with
the basements of the houses, and keeping half the
badauds the Paris cockneys hanging all day over
the parapets to watch a new centimeter disappear on
the painted scale. Poor Bercy, in the sparsely illumi-
nated darkness, looked like a little prosaic Venice, with
boats paddling about in the streets and Parisian lamp
posts rising out of muddy lagoons.

The only literary event of first-rate importance that
has occurred in Paris during the winter has been the
publication of Taine's Ancien Regime^ of which, at the
time, I made mention. In so sterile a season I suppose
that the appearance in the last number of the Revue
des Deux Mondes of the first installment of Ernest
Kenan's 9 Souvenirs d'Enfance may be spoken of as a
salient event. The article appears to have attracted
much attention, but to have caused some disappoint-
ment. It consists of two parts a few pages of per-
sonal reminiscence by M. Renan himself, and a narra-
tive taken down with considerable embellishment
from the lips of his mother. The story is tame and of
slender significance ; but M. Kenan's own memoirs are
enchanting. His touch is more exquisite, his style more
magical, surely, than any others of the day. The death
of Daniel Stern (Mme. d'Agoult) 10 and that of Mme.
I^ouise Colet n may also be spoken of as literary inci-

* 113

Parisian Sketches

dents. Mme. d'Agoult was a serious writer and Mme.
Colet a light one, but both ladies had had beauty and
adventures. Of these adventures the Abbe Liszt was
the hero in one case, and Alfred de Musset in the other.
I saw quoted the other day from Mme. d'Agoult a felici-
tous sentence: "An agreeable mind is a mind that is af-
firmative only in the measure strictly necessary." This
dictum is characteristic of a writer who was also a
very skillful maitresse de salon. Mme. Colet never said
anything so good as that. Some years ago, when Mme.
Sand published her very ill-advised Elle et Lui, and
Paul de Musset (the brother of the presumptive origi-
nal of the hero) retorted with Lui et Elle, Mme. Colet
cried like Correggio, "Anch 9 io son pittore!" and put
forth a tale entitled Lui, the purpose of which was to
prove, as I remember it, that she used to roam in the
Bois de Boulogne in the small hours of the night in a
low-necked dress, while "He," roaming hand in hand
with her, showered kisses upon her shoulders. "Orpheus
and the Bacchantes" these contributions to erotic his-
tory were happily called. Poor Orpheus !

HENRY JAMES, JR.
April 22, 1876
29 Rue de Luxembourg.

114

12

CHARTRES PORTRAYED x

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

BRILLIANT WEATHER IN PARIS PRELIMINARIES OF A

DAY'S EXCURSION IMPRESSIVENESS OF THE CATHEDRAL

AT CHARTRES GENERAL ASPECT OF THE TOWN

QUAINTNESS OF ITS SOCIAL LIFE

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, April 9. The spring in Paris, since it has
fairly begun, has been enchanting. The sun and the
moon haTe been blazing in emulation, and the differ-
ence between the blue sky of day and of night has been
as slight as possible. There are no clouds in the sky,
but there are little thin green clouds, little puffs of raw,
tender verdure, caught and suspended upon the
branches of the trees. All the world is in the streets ;
the chairs and tables which have stood empty all win-
ter before the cafe doors are at a premium ; the theaters
have become intolerably close the puppet shows in
the Champs EllysJees are the only form of dramatic en-
tertainment which seems consistent with the season. By
way of doing honor, at a small cost, to this ethereal
mildness, I went out the other day to the ancient town

115

Parisian Sketches

of Chartres, where I spent several hours of the purest
felicity* Pure felicity, in this hard world, always de-
serves to be recorded, and I cannot deny myself the
pleasure of commemorating my admiration of one of
the most beautiful churches in France. If one has not
been traveling for a long time, there is, to an apprecia-
tive mind, a sort of intoxication in the mere fact of
changing his place, and if one does so on a lovely
spring day, under picturesque circumstances, the satis-
faction is at its highest. To this perhaps rather friv-
olous emotion I must confess myself extremely sus-
ceptible, and the effect of it was to send me down to
Chartres in a shamelessly optimistic state of mind. I
was so prepared to be entertained and pleased with
everything that it is only a mercy that the Cathedral
happens to be a really fine building. If it had not been,
I should still have admired it inordinately and rendered
myself guilty of heaven knows what unpardonable
aesthetic error. But I am almost ashamed to say how
soon my entertainment began. It began, I think, with
my hailing a little open carriage on the boulevard and
causing myself to be driven to the Western Railway
station away across the river, up the Rue Bonaparte,
of art-student memories, and along the big, straight
Rue de Rennes to the Boulevard Montparnasse. Of
course, at this rate, by the time I reached Chartres
the journey is of a couple of hours I had almost
drained the cup of pleasure. But it was replenished
at the station, at the buffet, from the very good bottle
of wine I drank with my breakfast. Here, by the way,

116 *

Chart res Portrayed

is another excellent excuse for being enchanted with
any day's excursion in France wherever you are, you
may breakfast well. There may, indeed, if the station
is very small, be no buff et ; but if there is a buffet, you
may be sure that civilization in the persons of a sym-
pathetic young woman in a well-made black dress, and
a rapid, zealous, grateful waiter presides at it. It was
quite the least, as the French say, that after my break-
fast I should have thought the Cathedral, as I saw it
from the foot of the steep hill on which the town stands,
rising high above the clustered houses, and seeming to
make of their red-roofed agglomeration a mere pedestal
for its immense beauty, promised remarkably well. You
see it so as you emerge from the station, and then, as
you climb slowly into town, you lose sight of it. You
perceive Chartres to be a rather shabby little ville de
province, with a few sunny, empty open places, and
crooked, shady streets, in which two or three times you
lose your way, until at last, after more than once catch-
ing a glimpse, high above some slit between the houses,
of the clear gray towers shining against the blue sky,
you push forward again, risk another short cut, turn
another interposing corner, and stand before the goal
of your pilgrimage.

I spent a long time looking at Chartres Cathedral;
I revolved around it, like a moth around a candle; I
went away and I came back; I chose twenty different
standpoints ; I observed it during the different hours of
the day, and saw it in the moonlight as well as the sun-

117

Parisian Sketches

shine. I gained, in a word, a certain sense of familiarity
with it ; and yet I despair of giving any very coherent
account of it. Like most French cathedrals, it rises
straight out of the street, and it is without that setting
of turf and trees and deaneries and canonries which
contribute so largely to the impressiveness of the great
English churches. Thirty years ago a row of old
houses was glued to its base and made their back walls
of its sculptured sides. These have been plucked away,
and, relatively speaking, the church is fairly isolated.
But the little square that surrounds it is regretfully
narrow, and you flatten your back against the opposite
houses in the vain attempt to stand off and survey the
towers. The proper way to look at the towers would be
to go up in a balloon and hang poised, face to face
with them, in the blue air. There is, however, perhaps
an advantage in being forced to stand so directly under
them, for this position gives you an overwhelming im-
pression of their height. I have seen, I suppose, churches
as beautiful as this one, but I do not remember ever to
have been so touched and fascinated by architectural
beauty. The endless upward reach of the great west
front, the clear, silvery tone of its surface, the way a
few magnificent features are made to occupy its vast,
serene expanse, its simplicity, majesty, and dignity
these things crowd upon one's sense with an eloquence
that one must not attempt to translate into words. The
impressions produced by architecture lend themselves
as little to interpretation by another medium as those
produced by music. Certainly there is something of the

118 -

Chartres Portrayed

beauty of music in the sublime proportions of the
facade of Chartres.

The doors are rather low, as those of the English
cathedrals are apt to be, but (standing three together)
are set in a deep framework of sculpture rows of arch-
ing grooves, filled with admirable little images, stand-
ing with their heels on each other's heads. The church
as it now exists, except the northern tower, dates from
the middle of the thirteenth century, and these closely
packed figures are full of the grotesqueness of the
period. Above the triple portals is a vast round-topped
window, in three divisions, of the grandest dimensions
and the stateliest effect. Above this window is a circular
window of immense circumference, with a double row
of sculptured spokes radiating from its center and look-
ing on its great lofty field of stone, as expansive and
symbolic as if it were the wheel of Time itself. Higher
still is a little gallery with a delicate balustrade, sup-
ported on a beautiful cornice and stretching across the
front from tower to tower ; and above this is a range of
niched statues of kings fifteen, I believe, in number.
Above the statues is a gable, with an image of the Vir-
gin and Child on its front, and another of Christ on its
apex. In the relation of all these parts there is such a
spaciousness and harmony that while on the one side
the eye rests on a great many broad stretches of naked
stone, there is no approach on the other to overprofu-
sion of detail. The little gallery that I have spoken of,
beneath the statues of the kings, had for me a peculiar
charm* Unavailable, at its tremendous altitude, for

119

Parisian Sketches

other purposes, it seemed fantastically intended for the
little images to step down and walk about upon. When
the great fa?ade begins to glow in the late afternoon
light, you can imagine them strolling up and down
their long balcony in couples, pausing with their el-
bows on the balustrade, resting their stony chins in
their hands, and looking out, with their little blank
eyes, on the great view of the old French monarchy
they once ruled, and which now has passed away. The
two great towers of the Cathedral are among the no-
blest of their kind. They rise in solid simplicity to
about as great a height as the eye often troubles itself
to travel, and then, suddenly, they begin to execute a
magnificent series of feats in architectural gymnastics.
This is especially true of the northern spire, which is
a late creation, dating from the sixteenth century. The
other is relatively quiet ; but its companion is a sort of
tapering bouquet of sculptured stone. Statues and but-
tresses, gargoyles, arabesques, and crockets pile them-
selves in successive stages, until the eye loses the sense
of everything but a sort of architectural lacework. The
pride of Chartres, after its front, is the two portals of
its transepts great dusky porches, in three divisions,
covered with more images than I have space to talk
about. Wherever you look, along the sides of the church,
a time-worn image is niched or perched. The face of
each flying buttress is garnished with one, with the fea-
tures quite melted away.

The inside of the Cathedral corresponds in vastness
and grandeur to the outside it is the perfection of

120

Chartres Portrayed

Gothic in its prime. But I looked at it rapidly, the place
was so intolerably cold. It seemed to answer one's query
of what becomes of the winter when the spring chases it
away. The winter hereabouts has sought an asylum in
Chartres Cathedral, where it has found plenty of room
and may reside in a state of excellent preservation until
it can safely venture abroad again. I thought I had
been in cold churches before, but the thought had been
an injustice to the temperature of Chartres. The nave
was full of the little padded chairs of the Chartres
bourgeoisie, whose faith, I hope for their comfort, is of
the good old red-hot complexion. In a higher tempera-
ture I should have done more justice to the magnificent
old glass of the windows which glowed through the icy
dusk like the purple and orange of a winter sunset
and to the immense sculptured external casing of the
choir. This latter is an extraordinary piece of work. It
is a high Gothic screen, shutting in the choir, and cov-
ered with elaborate bas-reliefs of the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries, representing scenes from the life of
Christ and of the Virgin. Some of the figures are ad-
mirable, and the effect of the whole great semicircular
wall, chiseled like a silver bowl, is superb. There is also
a crypt of high antiquity and, I believe, great interest,
to be seen ; but my teeth chattered a respectful negative
to the sacristan who offered to guide me to it. It was so
agreeable to stand in the warm outer air again, that I
spent the rest of the day in it.

Although, besides its cathedral, Chartres has no very
rare architectural treasures, the place is picturesque,

121

Parisian Sketches

in a shabby, third-rate, poverty-stricken sort of fash-
ion, and my observations were not unremunerative.
There is a little church of Saint Aignan, of the six-
teenth century, with an elegant, decayed facade, and a
small tower beside it, lower than its own roof, to which
it is joined, in quaint, Siamese-twin fashion, by a single
long buttress. Standing there with its crumbling Ren-
aissance doorway in a kind of grass-grown alcove, it re-
minded me of what the tourist encounters in small Ital-
ian towns. Most of the streets of Chartres are crooked
lanes, winding over the face of the steep hill, the sum-
mit of the hill being occupied by half-a-dozen little
open squares, which seem like reservoirs of the dullness
and stillness that flow through the town. In the midst
of one of them rises an old dirty brick obelisk, com-
memorating the glories of the young General Marceau
of the First Republic "soldier at sixteen, general at
twenty-three, he died at twenty-seven." 2 Chartres gives
us an impression of extreme antiquity, but it is an an-
tiquity that has gone down in the world. I saw very few
of those stately little hotels, with pilastered fronts,
which look so well in the silent streets of provincial
towns. The houses are mostly low, small, and of sordid
aspect, and though many of them have overhanging
upper stories, and steep, battered gables, there is noth-
ing very exquisite in their quaintness.

I was struck, as an American always is in small
French and English towns, with the immense number
of shops, and their brilliant appearance, which seems
so out of proportion to any visible body of consumers.

122

Chartres Portrayed

At Chartres the shopkeepers must all feed upon each
other, for, whoever buys, the whole population sells.
The population in the streets appears to consist of sev-
eral hundred brown old peasant women, between sev-
enty and eighty years of age, with their faces cross-
hatched with wrinkles and their quaint white coifs
drawn tightly over their weather-blasted eyebrows.
Labor-stricken grandams, all the world over, are the re-
verse of lovely, for the toil that wrestles for its daily
bread, morsel by morsel, is not beautifying; but I
thought I had never seen the possibilities of female
ugliness so variously embodied as in the crones of Char-
tres. Some of them were leading small children by the
hand little red-cheeked girls, in the close black caps
and black pinafores of humble French infancy a cos-
tume which makes French children always look like or-
phans. Those who feel very "strongly" on the subject
of these little people being put out to nurse, as they
generally are, may maintain that there is truth in the
symbol. Others of the old women were guiding along the
flinty lanes the steps of small donkeys, some of them
fastened into little carts, others with well-laden backs.
These were the only quadrupeds I perceived at Char-
tres. Neither horse nor carriage did I behold, save at
the station the omnibuses of the rival inns the Grand
Monarque and the Due de Chartres which glare at
each other across the Grande Place. A friend of mine
told me that a few years ago, passing through Chartres,
he went by night to call upon a gentleman who lived
there. During his visit it came on to rain violently, and

123

Parisian Sketches

when the hour for his departure arrived the rain had
made the streets impassable. There was no vehicle to be
had, and my friend was resigning himself to a soaking.
"You can be taken of course in the sedan chair," said
his host with dignity. The sedan chair was produced,
a couple of servingmen grasped the handles, my friend
stepped into it, and went swinging back through the
last century to the Grand Monarque. This little an-
ecdote, I imagine, still paints Chartres socially.

Before dinner I took a walk on the planted prom-
enade which encircles the town the Tour-de-ville it is
called much of which is extremely picturesque. Char-
tres has lost her walls as a whole, but here and there
they survive, and play a desultory part in holding the
town together. In one place the rampart is really mag-
nificent smooth, strong, and lofty, curtained with ivy,
and supporting on its summit an old convent and its
garden. Only one of the city gates remains a narrow
arch of the fourteenth century, flanked by two ad-
mirable round towers, and preceded by a fosse. If you
stoop a little, as you stand outside, the arch of this
hoary old gate makes a most picturesque setting for
the picture of the interior of the town, and on the inner
hilltop against the sky the large gray mass of the Ca-
thedral. The ditch is full, and to right and to left it
flows along the base of the moldering wall, through
which the shabby backs of houses extrude, and which
is garnished with little wooden galleries, lavatories of
the town's soiled linen. These little galleries are filled
with washerwomen, who crane over and dip their many-

124 *

CJiartres Portrayed

colored rags into the yellow stream. The old patched
and interrupted wall, the ditch with its weedy edges,
the spots of color, the white-capped laundresses in their
little wooden cages one lingers to look at it all. To
wind up the day I dined at the table d'hote at the Grand
Monarque, in a company of voyageurs de commerce,
where I continued my observations. The dinner costs
three francs fifty centimes; the landlord sits at the
table and carves the meats, now and then manipulating
a recalcitrant joint rather freely; the guests empty the
dregs of their glasses on the floor, and clean their
knives and forks, between the courses, with bread
crumbs. But even among these circumstances the classic
French art of conversation is by no means lost, and in
paying my three francs fifty centimes I felt that I was
paying for something more than my material dinner.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
April 29, 1876

125

13

PARISIAN FESTIVITY

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

REAPPEARANCE OF THE BRITISH TOURIST THE CAR-
ROUSEL AT THE PALAIS DE I/INDUSTRIE CYNICAL AR-
TISTS M. MERMET'S OPERA OF "JEANNE D'ARC" RE-
CENT BOOKS

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, April 22. To say there has been nothing at
all to see, to hear, or to talk about during any given
fortnight in Paris is doubtless never a perfectly exact
statement; but I may safely say that for a couple of
weeks past the objects of interest have been rather of
the minor order. Holy Week has come and gone, and
the Easter holidays are now running their course. Dur-
ing the former brief period the spirit of profanity was
exercised much more effectually than I had supposed
possible in this epicurean city. For a week Paris was
palpably dull it seemed like a scene at the play when
the gaslights have been lowered. The impression was in-
creased by a sudden visitation of cold and sleet, and
Good Friday was really almost austere. People in search
of amusement needed sharp eyes to find it, and the wait-

126

Parisian Festivity

ers at the restaurants were almost aggressive in their
offers of fish. As regards Easter, what we are having
is much more an English than a French holiday. Early
on Monday morning the British tourist made his ap-
pearance on the boulevards, and he has been visible at
every turn ever since. He has fairly taken possession
of the city, and if his presence is fleeting it is, so to
speak, intense. You recognize him farther off than you
do an American ; he makes a more vivid spot in the pic-
ture. He is always and everywhere the same carrying
with him, in his costume and physiognomy, that inde-
finable expression of not considering anything out of
England worth making, physically or morally, a toilet
for. The unanimity with which Englishmen abroad un-
dress is indeed something surprising, and, say what we
will, it seems to me in a certain way to be a sort of
proof of that element of the still untamed and bar-
barous which some observers profess to find in the na-
tional character. I am sure M. Taine, for instance,
never meets of an evening a flannel-shirted, pea- jack-
eted, soft-hatted son of Albion, followed by his robust
feminine shadow, all blonde chignon and linsey-woolsey,
without murmuring to himself that the "Vikings" and
"Berserkers," the offspring of the north wind and the
sea fog, are not extinct. Civilization has modified them,
he must say, but it has not really altered them. No race
carries a heavier external load of proprieties and con-
ventional observances, but they are all on the surface,
they have not been absorbed, and on the slightest pre-
text the natural man reasserts himself. A good pretext

127

Parisian Sketches

is found in a visit to this brilliant and exquisite Paris,
the mother of arts and graces! What better proof of
the undercurrent of barbarism in the British tempera-
ment can there be (we may still imagine the foreign
critic inquiring) than the simple fact of the whole
British nation going into dishabille in this aesthetically
sacred spot? This has been a beautiful day, and I have
had occasion to walk about much in the streets. Every
few moments I have encountered an English family
papa, mamma, and daughters gazing into a shopwin-
dow, inquiring the way of the proprietress of a news-
paper kiosk, or climbing into or out of a cab. I came
home with a lively reflection uppermost in my mind
what a godsend is the British tourist to the French
caricaturist ! The French are an ugly race, if you will ;
the national type lacks dignity. The English are a
handsome race; they have nobler lines and a grander
mold than their neighbors ; and yet, given the British
physiognomy as you see it, at the end of protruded
necks, on the boulevards and the Rue de Rivoli, and
given the subtle, the acute, the diabolical French per-
ception of external facts, and it is not hard to decide
in whose shoes, for the moment, we would rather stand.
My own fingers, as I walked along, itched for the pencil
of "Cham" or of Daumier. 1

This is not only the time of the English, it is also
the time of the exhibitions. There have been two or
three already at the Palais de PIndustrie, and the series
is to culminate in ten days, in the opening of the Salon
of 1876. The last was the great annual horse fair an

128

Parisian Festivity

entertainment known here by the more elegant designa-
tion of a "Concours Hippique." It lasted a fortnight,
but I shall not attempt to recite its glories, being a
stranger to the mysteries of horse flesh. I was present
the last day, however, at a spectacle which it took no
particular initiation to enjoy. The Concours terminates
every year in what is here called a Carrousel a dis-
play of purely fantastic and picturesque horsemanship.
The Carrousel was held this year by the cadets of the
cavalry school of Saumur, and was in every way a high
festival. The whole vast nave of the Palais de Plndus-
trie was converted into an oblong arena, and though the
price of admission had been made high, to exclude the
populace, the crowd was mighty. Apart from it, under
a dais, sat the President of the Republic and Mme.
MacMahon, like a medieval king and queen presiding
at a tournament. It was simply the circus idealized
or rather, more correctly, realized. The knights and
cavaliers who rode at the Saracens' heads and hurled
their lances (this last not very felicitously, by the way)
at the great mask of the blackamoor, were real young
knights, with trappings not of tinsel, and holding their
honor and their lives in their hands. It was all very
graceful and gorgeous and effective for those ami-
able minds at least that linger over the picturesque
wherever they find it, and are ashamed to ask it im-
pertinent questions. Such minds, at such a spectacle,
may here and there have found themselves excusable
for reflecting on the exclusively brilliant side of mili-
tary pretensions. Standing armies are abominable

129

Parisian Sketches

things, the necessity of maintaining upward of a mil-
lion of men for pure destruction is an insupportable
burden to a country, and the armed suspense in which
all Europe is living is a reproach to civilization all
that is most uncontestable. And yet horrible as the
statement may sound the contemplative American
often finds himself wishing, or half wishing, that his
native land had, as a regular thing, some knowledge of
the military incubus. Don't call him too rudely to ac-
count his reasons are purely sentimental; he is will-
ing to admit even that they are immoral. He can only
say, in his irresponsible depravity, that living in a
country where the army is a great fact has opened his
perceptions to some of the good effects of having the
military virtues and the military spectacle constantly
before one's eyes. They are an expensive luxury, cer-
tainly; but it is proper after all to pay high for the
maintenance, in an honorable style, of such qualities as
gallantry and bravery. The French, in spite of their
humiliation and defeats, are to my sense extremely fond
of their army; they love it, they enjoy it, and admire
it; they watch it and judge it with a kind of romantic
tenderness. I felt this the other day at the Carrousel in
question ; there was a sort of arrested murmur of affec-
tion and delight running constantly through the vast
assembly. "AJi, qu'il est gentil, ce petit SmimurienF 9
you heard your neighbors exclaim; and there was a
loving cadence in the phrase that made me envy the
sentiment that produced it. I envied the state of mind
from which it sprung, as a part of the regular daily

130

Parisian Festivity

consciousness of the citizen and I envied the country
the possession of the brightly habited class which was
the object of it. This audacious apology for an argu-
ment amounts, perhaps after all, to the statement that
hair-splitters may discern, if they choose to take the
trouble, that in being without a standing army a coun-
try loses a few good things, as well as a vast number
of bad ones.

An exhibition for which I may at least claim that it
can give rise (at any rate in my own mind) to no dan-
gerous perversities of taste is that of the little group
of the Irreconcilables otherwise known as the "Im-
pressionists" in painting. 2 It is being held during the
present month at Durand-Ruel's, and I have found it
decidedly interesting. But the effect of it was to make
me think better than ever of all the good old rules
which decree that beauty is beauty and ugliness ugli-
ness, and warn us off from the sophistications of satiety.
The young contributors to the exhibition of which I
speak are partisans of unadorned reality and absolute
foes to arrangement, embellishment, selection, to the
artist's allowing himself, as he has hitherto, since art
began, found his best account in doing, to be preoccu-
pied with the idea of the beautiful. The beautiful, to
them, is what the supernatural is to the Positivists a
metaphysical notion, which can only get one into a
muddle and is to be severely let alone. Let it alone, they
say, and it will come at its own pleasure ; the painter's
proper field is simply the actual, and to give a vivid
impression of how a thing happens to look, at a par-

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Parisian Sketches

ticular moment, is the essence of his mission. This atti-
tude has something in common with that of the Eng-
lish Preraphaelites, twenty years ago, but this little
band is on all grounds less interesting than the group
out of which Millais and Holman Hunt rose into fame.
None of its members show signs of possessing first-rate
talent, and indeed the "Impressionist" doctrines strike
me as incompatible, in an artist's mind, with the exist-
ence of first-rate talent. To embrace them you must be
provided with a plentiful absence of imagination. But
the divergence in method between the English Pre-
raphaelites and this little group is especially striking,
and very characteristic of the moral differences of the
French and English races. When the English realists
"went in," as the phrase is, for hard truth and stern
fact, an irresistible instinct of righteousness caused
them to try to purchase forgiveness for their infidelity
to the old more or less moral proprieties and conven-
tionalities, by an exquisite, patient, virtuous manipu-
lation by being above all things laborious. But the
Impressionists, who, I think, are more consistent, ab-
jure virtue altogether, and declare that a subject
which has been crudely chosen shall be loosely treated.
They send detail to the dogs and concentrate them-
selves on general expression. Some of their generaliza-
tions of expression are in a high degree curious. The
Englishmen, in a word, were pedants, and the French-
men are cynics.

Among the exhibitions, I take it, may be ranked M.
Mermet's new opera, Jeanne d'Arc* which, after be-

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Parisian Festivity

ing kept back for many years and a great deal talked
about, has at last been produced. It was in rehearsal
at the time of the destruction by fire of the old Opera
house, and the composer's score was one of the very few
objects snatched from the flames. Thus providentially
rescued, it would seem that M. Mermet's work had
been reserved for a brilliant destiny. It has found one
to a certain extent in being put upon the stage at the
new Opera with extraordinary splendor, and rendered
by Faure and Mile. Krauss with exemplary zeal; but
here its good fortune stops. It has made no advance in
the public favor; it is pronounced hopelessly dull and
tame. Even to an auditor to whom musical things are
fathomless mysteries, and who, if he fails to appreciate
good music, finds in general a compensation in not suf-
fering from bad, the ponderosity of Jearme d'Arc
seemed the other night sufficiently palpable. There is
only one voice to proclaim it, and M. Mermet must
wish his work had been left to the charity of the flames
they would have been kinder than the critics. The
opera is played to full houses, however, thanks to the
splendor of the spectacle and to the affluence of stran-
gers who desire to see the house on any terms. The
mise en scene is indeed superb, and more perfect than
anything of the same sort that I have ever seen. There
is in particular a certain representation of the gardens
of the castle of Blois, with the long mass of the chateau
foreshortened in the sunshine above them, and the
goodly Loire country receding in the distance beyond
the winding, shining rivers, and beneath a vast, bright

1SS-

Parisian Sketches

summer sky, which reaches the highest ideal of scene
painting. There is also a ballet of ribaudes camp
maidens and female vagabonds which is the perfection
of the expensive picturesque.

I have on my table three or four books of which I
had meant to speak, but I have as usual left myself
little space for literature. The literary remains of
Sainte-Beuve 4 are being brought to light with merci-
less energy the Chroniques P&risiennes and the
Cahiers de Sainte-Beuve having appeared within two
or three weeks of each other. I use the word "merciless"
rather with regard to the great critic's victims than to
his own reputation. The emptying of table drawers
of memoranda after an eminent writer's death has al-
ways a disagreeable and painful side, 5 but if this post-
humous rummaging is ever justifiable, it may pass in
the case of Sainte-Beuve. His literary house was always
in such good order that an irregular visit will discover
no untidiness, and moreover he belonged to that only
small order of minds for which it may be claimed that
their lightest thoughts and utterances have a value.
But some of his friends and acquaintances will be more
interested than gratified to read the notes and observa-
tions he made upon their conversation and talents for
his own use. He was sharp enough in his ccvwseries with
the public, but he was sharper still in tete-a-tete with
himself. It is interesting to have a glimpse of his liter-
ary practices to see how he lived pen in hand and took
notes not only upon what he read but upon what he
heard, thought, felt, and dreamed. Never was there so

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literary a life. Another book of the hour is Emile
Zola's 6 new novel. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon,
which has attained a success not hitherto enjoyed by
the productions of this remarkable young writer. The
success of the present work is owing partly to its clever-
ness, partly to the fact that it is a presentation, through
a transparent veil, of actual persons, and chiefly, I sus-
pect, to its brutal indecency. Eugene Rougon is Eugene
Rouher, M. de Marsy is M. de Morny, and the initiated
will tell you who Clorinda Balbi, the heroine, is. This
last is a most amazing portrait. Emile Zola, a "pupil"
of Gustave Flaubert, is, as a novelist, the most thor-
oughgoing of the little band of the out-and-out real-
ists. Unfortunately the real, for him, means exclusively
the unclean, and he utters his crudities with an air of
bravado which makes them doubly intolerable.

HENKY JAMES, JR.
May 13, 1876

135

14

ART IN FRANCE

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

THE SALON OF 1876 GREATNESS OF THE DISPLAY

BORE'S COLOSSAL CANVAS LARGE PAINTINGS BY MON-

CHABLON, BIN, AND BLANC M. SYLVESTRE ? S PORTRAYAL

OF NERO EXCELLENCE OF M. DETAILLE ? S WAR SCENE

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, May 5. I find no difficulty today in deciding
what to write about ; for chroniclers and talkers there
is only one possible subject. The Salon the ninety-
third in the history of the institution opened a few
days since, and all the scribblers are mending their
pens. 1 1 have paid three visits to the Palais de Plndus-
trie (in which the exhibition is held) , and I have, I be-
lieve from my own point of view separated the sheep
from the goats, and earned the right to attempt some
coherent discourse. It seems at first as if coherency in
one's impressions would be slow to arrive ; the first ef-
fect of so vast an array of pictures, pervaded by a
high average of cleverness, is most bewildering and con-
founding. The Salon this year is very large ; there are,
exclusive of drawings and cartoons and without mak-

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Art in France

ing mention of sculpture, 2,095 pictures. The regula-
tion enacted during the present year, in virtue of which
an artist has a right to exhibit tut two works, has not
had the effect of reducing the exhibition numerically;
it contains upward of a hundred pictures more than
that of 1875. It is, moreover, not of exceptional bril-
liancy; the number of works which make landmarks
in its long-drawn extent is not large. It is hardly more
than a fair average salon though it must be added
that it may be only this and yet leave a lively impres-
sion of cleverness upon the Anglo-Saxon visitors.

Amid such a chaos of productions it is hard to know
how to measure conflicting claims or what to speak of
first. The easiest course is perhaps to let simple size
take precedence, and to dismiss at once what are called
the "machines" of the exhibition. Large pictures in
France are usually spoken of as de la pemture de
style; a properly constituted salon must have a certain
number of them ; they are a sort of propitiatory offer-
ing to the "high-toned" Muse. This year there are a
great many such offerings, but in each of these quality
and quantity are to my sense more than ever divorced.
For simple brute size a colossal canvas by Gustave Dore
carries off the palm a canvas presenting to us M.
Dore's conception of "Christ's Entrance into Jeru-
salem. 55 I do not see what old memories of admiration
for Gustave Dore's genius in the days when he treated
it with common humanity should avail to make an even
very amiable critic hesitate to speak of this as a rather
shameless performance. M. Dore treats his genius now

' 1S7 *

Parisian Sketches

as you wouldn't treat a tough, and patient old cab
horse; I know of few spectacles more painful in the
annals of art. Imagine a colored print from the supple-
ment of an illustrated paper magnified a thousandfold
and made to cover almost a whole side of a great hall,
and you have M. Dore's sacred picture. A vast, garish
crowd is sprawling on its knees over a mass of palm
boughs, in front of a pasteboard colonnade, through
one of the arches of which a figure which a school boy
might have daubed advances on an ass. There is no
color or worse than none no drawing, no expression,
no feeling, no remotest hint of detail; nothing but an
immense mechanical facility, from which every vestige
of charm and imagination has departed. But it is really
very naif on my part to be so explicit. There is an im-
mense Jeanne d'Arc by M. Monchablon, bounding over
agglomerated corpses, brandishing her sword and hero-
ically screaming ; I don't know what sustained the artist
through the execution of this very spacious work it
was not the force of talent. There is a great canvas
representing "Harmony, 55 for a governmental ceiling,
by M. Bin, full of elegant muses and foreshortened lute
players ; (M. Bin's picture, which is meant to be above
one's head, horizontally, is hung against the wall, and
the spectator in consequence is made to feel as if he,
tipsily, had lost his proper standpoint an imputation
which he resents by not admiring the picture as much,
perhaps, as he ought to do) . There is a brilliant and
elegant group from Ariosto by M. Joseph Blanc the
deliverance of Angelica from the sea monster the most

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Art in France

agreeable, to my mind, of the big pictures. It is a kind
of picture which leaves us cold, but it is very good of
its kind painted in a high, light tone, full of pinks
and light blues and other elegant tints, but with a
great deal of skill of arrangement and refinement of
taste. It is the only one of the tableaux do style which
seems to me to possess much style. Style is what M.
Laccetti, who paints in quite a different tone, and
affects intense browns and powerful shadows, has aimed
at in his "Orestes and the Furies." He has only half
hit it, I think, but he has missed it with a good deal
of vigor and picturesqueness.

The striking picture of the year and the one, prob-
ably, to which nineteen twentieths of the visitors to the
salon attribute most talent, is a great subject by M.
Sylvestre a "Locusta trying the effects of poisons
before Nero." As a subject the thing is detestable, inas-
much as it allows almost no chance for beauty ; but as
an accomplished and picturesque piece of painting of
the younger, larger, and richer academic sort, com-
bining a good deal of reality with a good deal of ar-
rangement, it is a remarkable success. I suppose the
picture is marked for the medal of honor or at least
for the first medal in painting. Nero is seated, leaning
forward, with his elbow on the back of his chair, and
his hand over his mouth, watching the contortions of
a slave who, extended on the pavement, is expiring in
agony before him. Beside him, and nearer the spectator,
is seated the horrible Locusta, descanting upon the
properties of her dose, her face turned toward him and

139 *

Parisian Sketches

ier arm, with a strangely familiar gesture, lying across
tiis knee the movement of the outstretched hand
meanwhile giving point to her explanation. She is a
gaunt, swarthy gypsy, half naked, and with the profile
of a murderess. Nero is both listening and watching,
and the grave, intent, inquisitive depravity of his dark,
fat, youthful face is very cleverly rendered. The por-
tentous familiarity, the sinister "chattiness" of this
precious couple is indeed in a high degree effective.
But the strong point of the picture is the figure of
the victim of their interesting experiment the slave
who is writhing in a horrible spasm upon the polished
marble pavement. This is strong drawing and strong
painting, and it does great honor to the young artist.
The man is a magnificent fellow, in his prime, with a
fair beard and a yellow headcloth, and he stretches out
his arms with an agonized movement which is at once
very real and very noble. Into this figure, indeed, the
painter has introduced a certain element of beauty it
has great breadth and yet much detail, great solidity
and yet not a little elegance. It is, in a word, very in-
telligent. But there is something vulgar in the way the
picture is lighted, something coarse in its tone, some-
thing in the effect it produces that falls below the talent
that has been expended upon it. M. Sylvestre is not a
painter who sets you dreaming about his future. The
same subject has been treated by another artist, M.
Aublet, with inferior although with noticeable skill.
M. Aublet gives us three or four poisoned slaves, wrig-
gling over the pavement in different attitudes; the

140

Art in France

effect is slightly grotesque they suggest toads hop-
ping out after a shower. This simple jest is not heart-
less, inasmuch as M. Aublet's slaves do not produce a
lively impression of reality. His picture is flanked on
each side by an equally huge and much less clever scene
of torture one, a so-called "Diversion of a Courtesan"
a lady reclining on a gigantic couch and watching
a slave bleed to death at her feet (I recommend the
subject), the other "Clytemnestra and Agamemnon,"
reeking with blood and mediocrity. It is a charming
trio, and it is a great pity it should not be seen by
those critics in Berlin who affirm that French art is
chiefly remarkable for its cruelty.

If M. Sylvestre's picture is the most impressive in
the Salon, I have no doubt that the most popular will
be the contribution of M. Detaille, the admirable mili-
tary painter. It is indeed already, of all the pictures,
the most closely surrounded, and it has a good right
to its honors. It is called "En Reconnaissance," and
represents a battalion of chasseurs coining into a vil-
lage street in which a cavalry fight has just taken place
and scattered its trophies over the ground. A squad
of sharpshooters is preceding the rest of the troop and
advancing cautiously along the crooked, bloodstained
lane. They have paused and are scanning the lay of the
land in front of them the leader checking them with
a backward movement of his hand, while he listens to
an urchin who has come up to speak to him & patriot
of thirteen, in blouse and muffler, doing his boyish best
to be useful, and give damaging information. This boy,

. 141-

Parisian Sketches

with his light, small body, so well indicated beneath his
thin blouse, his cold red face, his hand in his pocket,
his scanty trousers, is the great success of the picture ;
in the gesture with which he points, eagerly and mod-
estly, down the street there is something singularly
vivid and true. On the right, in the foreground, a
Prussian lancer and his horse have lately tumbled head
foremost; though they are not yet cold they are piti-
fully and awkwardly dead. A couple of the sharpshoot-
ers are glancing down at them as they pass, with dif-
ferent expressions "It served him right" in one case ;
"It's a bad business at best" in the other. These men
are all admirably studied. On the left a gendarme,
badly wounded, has collapsed against a garden wall,
through the open gate of which a man, peeping out, is
trying to drag him in. In the rear, through the gray
snowy air, the rest of the chasseurs are coming up. The
picture is remarkably perfect and complete a page
torn straight from unpublished history. The variety
and vividness of the types, the expressiveness of the
scene, without a touch of exaggeration or grimace, the
dismal chill of the weather, the sense of possible bullets
in the air, the full man size of the little figures, the
clean, consummate brilliancy of the painting, make it
a work of which nothing but good is to be said.

The picture which will appeal most strongly to the
inner circle of observers those who enjoy a first-class
method more than an entertaining story is unques-
tionably the much-noticed, the already famous "In-
terieur d' Atelier" of M. Munkacsy. It divides with

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Art in France

one other work, to my sense, the claim of being the
most masterly piece of painting in the Salon. The other
work is a portrait, of which I will presently speak.
Meanwhile M. Munkacsy, who is a Hungarian, with
a Parisian reputation already established, comes so
near the absolute of solid and superb painting that it
little matters how we settle the question of pre-emi-
nence. I do not know when I have seen a piece of artistic
work of any kind which struck me as having so purely
masculine a quality. M, Munkacsy's painting is strong
as a rich baritone voice is strong in the same personal
and closely characteristic way. Imagine the baritone
voice admirably educated and master of every secret
and mystery of vocalism, and the analogy is complete.
M. Munkacsy belongs to the school of painters for
whom a "subject" is simply any handsome object what-
soever anything materially paintable. He does not
resort to history or mythology for his themes, and it
doubtless seems as absurd to him that you should have
to look at a picture with one eye on a literary para-
graph in a catalogue, as that you should listen to a
song with one ear applied to a tube into which a spoken
explanation should be injected. His subject here is
simply a handsome woman in a blue velvet dress sit-
ting in profile before an easel on which stands a small
landscape, and of a man (the painter himself) loung-
ing against a table between her and the easel. The lady
is bent forward, her hands are pressed together in her
lap, she is looking intently and appreciatively before
her; the artist, who is in light drab garments, presents

143

Parisian Sketches

his full face, but turns it slightly askance, and eyes his
work more critically. There is nothing here very new
and strange, and yet the picture is admirably full and
rich. It is composed in what I believe painters call an
extremely low key it is an extraordinary harmony of
the deepest tones, unrelieved by a touch of light color
or by more than a gleam of high light. And yet in spite
of the sort of unctuous brown cavern of which the
studio seems at first to consist, you presently perceive
that there is nothing cheap or brutal in the artist's
dusky accumulations of color, that everything is de-
fined, harmonized, and made to play a part. The paint-
ing has incomparable breadth and freedom, and yet all
its rich, bold brush work has been admirably wrought,
and, as it were, melted together. There are almost no
sensible lines anywhere, and yet there is no sensible
evasion of line; it is rare to see a picture in which
draughtmanship is so enveloped and muffled in color.
There is plenty of detail, and yet it is all detail in such
warm, fluid juxtaposition that you are conscious of it
only through your general impression of richness. The
heads are admirable full of solidity and relief; the
only complaint to be made of them is that they are
painted too much in the same tone and on the same
level as the inanimate parts of the picture. A little
more rosiness, a little infusion of light, would not have
spoiled them. The blue velvet dress of the lady is, how-
ever, the great triumph. It is one of the most interest-
ing pieces of frippery that I have seen in many a day,
and the way it is painted is a sort of resume of the

144'

Art m France

manner of the whole picture. It is the work of a man
who stands completely outside of it and its superficial
appeals, and has, regarding its texture and tone, a
vision, a judgment, and a conviction of his own. This
second solution, as the apothecaries say, of blue velvet
a trifle faded and worn, has a peculiar charm. I meant
to add a word about the magnificent portrait of M.
Wallon, the late Minister of Public Instruction, by
M. Bastien-Lepage the gem, to my mind, of the ex-
hibition. But I shall be obliged, with your permission,
to devote another letter to the Salon, and I defer my
remarks. I shall not be sorry, on the ground of not
having yet committed myself to utterance about it, to
go and look at the picture again.

HENBT JAMES, JR.
May 27, 1876

145

15

ART IN PAHIS

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

THE SAX.ON BEVISITED DISTINCTIVE MERITS OF THE

PRINCIPAL PORTRAITS PAINTINGS BY MM. GEROME,

CABANEiL, BOTJGTJEREAU, AND VIBERT M. MOREATl's

ARTISTIC VAGARIES THE LANDSCAPES AND THE STATU-
ARY

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, May 6. In my last letter I gave but an in-
complete account of the Salon. I was obliged to leave
some of the most interesting works unmentioned. 1
Among these is the portrait of M. Wallon, the late
Minister of Public Instruction, by M. Bastien-Lepage,
certainly the best portrait in the exhibition, and in a
certain sense the most perfect work. It is rather dry
and literal, it lacks freedom and style, but it is a mas-
terly piece of painting, and it possesses, if not a high,
at least a very solid interest. It represents an old man
of a sedentary, scholarly complexion, with a bald, re-
treating forehead the forehead retreats admirably
a pair of clear, pale blue eyes, and a face puckered
and kneaded and softly bruised, as it were, by Time.

146 -

Art m Paris

The modeling of the face, the minute detail of the
complexion, the distinct yet subdued relief of the nose,
the vaguely chafed and frost-nipped tones about the
mouth all this is admirable. It is patient, analytic,
unimaginative painting, but the result is a remarkable
expression of reality a reality which, in the face,
vividly recalls Holbein. Holbein, however, would have
given his subject a better body than M. Bastien-Le-
page has done. There are no ribs or limbs beneath the
black coat and trousers which indicate the figure, the
painter's skill in modeling seeming to have exhausted
itself in the face. It revives, indeed, briefly in the hands,
which are placed flatly, with strictly historic awkward-
ness, on each of the knees, and are admirable in their
mottled, elderly plumpness. On the whole, it is a very
fine portrait in a secondary manner which I think is
better than being a second-rate work in a grand man-
ner. If the merit of a work of art is to be measured
by the completeness with which it executes what it at-
tempts, this performance of M. Bastien-Lepage de-
serves a very honorable mention. I may as well speak
at once of the other portraits or of such of them as
are worth being commemorated. The number, of course 3
is enormous, and the cumulative effects of so many ex-
pansive effigies, in elaborated .toilets, or in still more
elaborate dishabille, each addressing its own peculiar
simper to the promiscuous throng that tramps through
the exhibition, is no less irritating than usual. The
level of clearness, so high in all French painting,
strikes me as rather lower in the line of portraiture

147

Parisian Sketches

than elsewhere; nevertheless there is plenty of the
cleverness to which it is not necessary to allude. M.
Carolus-Duran, the fashionable portrait painter par
excellence, represents M. fimile de Girardin composing
an editorial at a writing table, and a lady in a white
ball dress coining downstairs, with her hand on the
balustrade. Both pictures are below his reputation. M.
de Girardin's pale face appears to have been "enam-
eled" for the occasion ; it is suffused with a vulgar and
unnatural bloom. His hands, which are apparently
handsome (after the plump French model) , are, how-
ever, rather skillfully painted. The lady on the stairs
is a decided failure; her bare arm, following the line
of the balustrade, takes two or three twists and turns
too many, and her satin-shod foot, seeking the lower
step, gropes downward like that of a blind person. Add
to this that the lady is holding up her head with an
air which seems to proclaim that if there are two things
in which, more than in others, she takes a pardonable
satisfaction, they are her arm and her foot. There is
a charming portrait by M. Baudry of a tall, slim, de-
lightfully lady-like person, seated and looking at the
world over the back of a gilded chair; and there is a
representation by M. Cabanel of a young lady of great
natural advantages snowy arms and shoulders, and
vividly auburn tresses standing very bravely up to
display them.

There are pink-fingered chiffonne young women by
Chaplin, whom one can scarcely approach for their
admirers, and who look as if they had been painted

148 -

Art in Paris

with a compound of distilled rose leaves and dewdrops.
It is a very light painting, certainly ; but a great deal
of talent has gone to making it light. The talent, how-
ever, had better have gone elsewhere. There are two
agreeable, and for a woman sufficiently solid, portraits
by Mile. Jacquemart, who sprang into fame a few years
since with a remarkable portrait of M. Thiers. But her
present work would not have made her famous, and
will hardly even keep her so. She had the misfortune
to make a hit, and she is now paying, in relative ob-
scurity, the penalty. One of the most interesting por-
traits in the Salon is that of the great Russian novelist,
Tourgueneff, by a young Russian artist of high prom-
ise, M. Harlamoff, who attracted notice last year by
a remarkable portrait of Mme. Pauline Viardot. Half
the interest of M. Harlamoflf's picture, this year as
well, is in the admirable physiognomy of the model,
which would have offered a sovereign resistance to triv-
ial treatment; but it is also a very robust and bril-
liantly simple piece of painting. M. Tourgueneff, clad
in a brown velvet coat, sits with his hands in his lap,
presenting his full face, which is pervaded by an air
of intense and sinister revery. This expression is power-
fully rendered, but it has the great fault of not being
that of the least irritable of men of genius. A work
which has at the least its share of gazers is a huge rep-
resentation, by M. Clairin, of Mile, Sarah Bernhardt,
the bright particular star of the Comedie Fran$aise.
Considering the very small space which this young
lady takes up in nature her thinness is quite phe-

- 149 -

Parisian Sketches

nomenal she occupies a very large one at the Salon.
M. Clairin's portrait is vast and superficially brilliant,
but really, I think, not above mediocrity. There is a
remarkable white satin wrapper, in which the actress,
who is lolling on a sort of oriental divan, is twisted and
entangled with something of her peculiar snake-like
grace, and which shines from afar ; and there are dra-
peries and plants and rugs, and a great deerhound. The
only thing wanting is Mile. Bernhardt herself. She is
wanting even more in her second portrait, by Mile.
Louise Abbema, in which she is standing, in a black
walking dress ; and in this almost equally large work
there are no accessories, good or bad, to make up for
the deficiency.

M. Bonnat, whose superb portrait of Mme. Pasca in
the last Salon was the picture of the year, has added
nothing to his reputation by his present performance
a large "Jacob wrestling 1 with the Angel." Two
naked athletes, in a sort of flesh-colored cave, are inter-
locking their arms and legs and clinching their teeth ;
but neither of them is moving an inch which indeed
is quite natural, as they are composed, to all appear-
ance, of rose-colored granite. The picture contains some
very vigorous drawing, but little painting and no in-
terest. It is a powerful but almost unredeemed failure.
If M. Bonnat, from whom much was expected, has
given two poor figures, M. Vollon, from whom nothing
was expected, has produced a magnificent one. M. Vol-
lon has been hitherto an admired painter of landscape
and natures morte*, but until this year he had not given

ISO

Art m Paris

his full measure. His "Fishwife of Dieppe 55 is one of
the finest things in the Salon, and all the finer for
having a certain generous amateurishness of manner.
One sees that M. Vollon's figure is half experimental;
but this only augments the pleasure of seeing it so suc-
cessful. A tall, bare-legged peasant woman, in a dusky
white cap, a tattered kilt, and a chemise so ragged that
it exposes completely her strong brown shoulders and
bosom, is moving across the shore with long steps and
with an empty fishing basket hung on her back. The
picture is hardly more than a sketch; it has no bril-
liancy of color, and the background is a mere indica-
tion ; but the character of the picture is at once so true
and so noble, the action is so free, the poise of the head,
the swing of the legs, the lightness of the step are so
happily seized, and yet in so just and delicate a meas-
ure idealized, that the whole expression is strikingly
grand. The body is admirably painted; the legs are
animated human limbs. M. Vollon, after this, I sup-
pose, will not hide his light under a bushel. Among the
French painters best known in America, M. Gerome is,
as usual, conspicuous for his cleverness. He exhibits a

small picture of a "Santon at the door of a Mosque"

a characteristically hard and brilliant piece of oriental-
ism. A great square-shouldered dervish, with his filthy
body all but entirely naked, his head shaved, and his
huge mouth contorted with pious vociferation, is ap-
parently keeping guard over a congregation of shoes
which the ingoing worshipers have deposited on the
threshold of a Mussulman temple. It was for these

151

Parisian Sketches

shoes, I suspect, that the picture was painted, and as
they are treated they are quite worth it. They are of
all sizes, colors, and shapes, and full of ingenious ex-
pression. They make a very picturesque, an almost dra-
matic array. M. Cabanel's second picture is the prop-
erty, I see by the catalogue, of a lady of New York. It
represents the spouse of the Song of Solomon, sitting
cross-legged on the ground and gazing upward, in a
mystical languor of love, divine or profane, as one may
choose. She is a very handsome Jewess; her eyes are
long, her flesh transparent, and her draperies very ele-
gant. Apropos of transparent flesh, the inexhaustible
M. Bouguereau exhibits two pictures characterized by
all his extraordinary skill and his abuse of tones and
glossy surfaces. It is a standing wonder that a man
can paint at once so finely and so perversely. The larger
of M. Bouguereau's pictures, a Piete of many figures,
contains passages of drawing and even of painting
which many an artist would be glad to sign with his
name who would yet be quite ashamed to stand respon-
sible for the thin, manufactured interest and the china-
plate aspect of the whole. A few years ago M. Gustave
Moreau made a series of brilliant appearances at the
Salon as the apostle of a new and strange treatment of
mythological subjects. His mythology and his strange-
ness remain, but his novelty and his renown have some-
what waned. He is ingenious, erudite, and highly imag-
inative; if M. Gustave Flaubert, the eminent novelist,
when he wrote his Temptation of St. Anthony, had been
disposed to painting instead of writing, he would prob-

152

Art m Paris

ably have gone to work in M. Moreau's fashion. M.
Moreau, with his "Hercules and the Hydra of Lernos"
and his "Salom," has produced two very rare and curi-
ous works ; he is an original and interesting, if not a
satisfactory colorist. But his performances enter com-
pletely, to my sense, into the domain of the arbitrary
and the fantastic, and I give up the attempt to follow
him. Too much of the arbitrary in a picture is as un-
comfortable as a little is indispensable. A painter who
is greatly relished in America, where many of his pic-
tures are owned, M. George Vibert, has two works, one
of which I should have mentioned among the portraits.
It represents, in emulation of M. Carolus-Duran, a
lady descending a staircase but in a strictly possible
position; her hands crossed in front of her, and her
blue velvet dress and the train of her dress lying splen-
didly up the steps behind her. It is very rich and agree-
able. M. Vibert's second work deals with a theme of
which he has made a specialty the carnal infirmities,
humorously viewed, of monks and priests. In "L'Anti-
chambre de Monseigneur," a rubicund friar, waiting
for an audience with the Bishop, is making himself
agreeable to a pretty young country woman who is
seated beside him on a satin sofa, while another friar,
ostensibly reading his breviary, peeps round the corner
of a recess, over his shoulder, to see what his companion
is, in vulgar phrase, "up to." It is very clever storytell-
ing and very pretty painting. I have said nothing of
the landscapists, but it is not because they are not

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Parisian Sketches

numerous. I am exhausting my space. Besides, land-
scapes suffer at crowded exhibitions more than figure
pieces; their want of isolation is more fatal to them,
and a great effort is required to judge them as they
are meant to be judged on the artist's easel or the
owner's favoring wall. Daubigny has two large per-
formances which, although vigorous and expressive,
have rather less even than usual of this powerful sketch-
er's moderate amount of charm. M. Daubigny is rather
brutal. Not so M. Franfais not enough so perhaps.
There is always a touch of the historic, academic, ar-
ranged landscape in M. Franfais' pictures, but there is
plenty of genuine nature too, and the combination is
often admirable. This is the case this year. In the way
of landscape the things I have most enjoyed are two
low, long pictures by an admirable Polish artist M.
Chelmonsld by name ; a couple of winter scenes in Rus-
sia. One of them, the "Thaw in Ukraine," is a thor-
ough masterpiece. A rickety sleigh has stopped at a
village ale house, and its four horses, harnessed abreast,
are steaming, fetlock deep, in the yellow slush of the
highway. At the door are gathered a dozen figures, ad-
mirably real and admirably Russian; the inimitable
samovar the national tea urn is deposited in the
midst of them, in the filthy snow. The truth and vigor
of this little scene are masterly the black, panting,
sweating horses, the rising dampness, the snow-charged
sky, the high-thatched, smoke-swept roof of the hut,
the extreme variety and vivacity of the figures. M.
Chelmonski, if I am not mistaken, has been an admiring

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observer of that most delightful of Dutch painters,
Salomon Ruysdael. I must add briefly that a number of
American artists are represented at the Salon among
them being Messrs. May, Bacon, Edgar Ward, and
Bridgman. Most of the contributions of these gentle-
men are agreeable and entertaining the most notice-
able, perhaps, being Mr. Bacon's "Franklin at Home
at Philadelphia."

The ground floor at the Palais de PIndustrie is con-
verted by the Salon into a garden, reasonably blooming
under the circumstances, and dotted with the contribu-
tions of sculpture. As usual, these are numerous, but
everything this year is cast into the shade by the two fig-
ures of M. Paul Dubois portions of a monument about
to be erected to Gen. Lamoriciere at Nantes. These
two figures are of surpassing beauty, and altogether
the most eminent works in the Salon. (M. Dubois is
generally known by his charming "Florentine Singer,"
in bronze, now in the Museum of the Luxembourg.) I
have left myself no space to speak of these images of
"Charity" and "Military Courage"; I must content
myself with recording briefly but emphatically my ad-
miration for them. They are not only better in degree
than any other work of art of the year; they are quite
unique in kind. They are interesting and touched
strongly with ideal beauty; they do the artist the
greatest honor. Not to be utterly incomplete I must
say that Mile. Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, has a
huge group of an old peasant woman holding in her
lap, in a frenzied posture, the body of her drowned

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grandson. The thing is extremely amateurish, but it is
surprisingly good for a young lady whom the public
knows to draw upon her artistic ingenuity for so many
other purposes.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
June 5, 1876

156

16

PARISIAN TOPICS

Letter -from Henry James, Jr.

M. ERNEST KENAN'S NEW VOLUME M. MICHELET'S

RETIREMENT FROM THE STAGE A MINOR ART EXHIBI-
TION PLANS FOR THE GREAT EXPOSITION OF 1878

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, May 27. M. Ernest Renan has just pub-
lished a new volume, 1 which will not fail to find its way
speedily into the hands of all lovers of good writing.
A new volume by Renan is an intellectual feast ; if he
is not the first of French writers, I don't know who
may claim the title. In these Dialogues et Fragments
PTiHosophiques, indeed, it is the dialogues alone that
are new; they occupy but half of the volume, the rest
of which is composed of reprinted pieces. The dialogues
are a sort of jeu d'esprit, but a jeu d : 'esprit of a very
superior kind the recreation of a man of elevated
genius. They are prefaced by a few pages breathing a
very devoted patriotism, and proving that the author's
exorbitant intellectual reveries have not relaxed his
sense of the plain duties of citizenship. To win back

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that esteem which he appears willing to concede that
they have in some degree forfeited, he exhorts his fellow
countrymen above all things to work. Let each, he says,
surpass himself in his own particular profession, "so
that the world may still cry of us, 'These Frenchmen
are still the sons of their fathers; eighty years ago
Condorcet, in the midst of the Reign of Terror, wait-
ing for death in his hiding place in the Rue Servandoni,
wrote his Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind. 9 **
M. Renan imagines a group of friends, who assemble
in a quiet corner of a park of Versailles, to exchange
reflections upon the "ensemble de PUnivers." The sub-
ject is extensive, and it may well take half a dozen
talkers to cover the ground. Three persons, however,
take the lead, each one of whom unfolds his particular
view of the cosmos. These three views are classed by
M. Renan under the respective heads of "Certainties,"
"Probabilities," and "Reveries." He disclaims them all
as a representation of his own opinions, and says that
he has simply entertained himself with imagining what
might be urged and argued in each direction. It is
probable, however, that if his convictions and feelings
are not identical with those of either of his interlocu-
tors, they have a great deal in common with the whole
mass of the discussion, and that Philalethes, Theophras-
tus, and Theoctistes are but names for certain moods
of M. Renan's mind. If so, one can only congratulate
him upon the extraordinary ingenuity and fertility of
his intellect and the entertaining company of his
thoughts. These pages are full of good things admira-

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bly said, of brilliant and exquisite suggestions, and of
happy contributions to human wisdom. Their fault is
the fault which for some time has been increasing in
M. Kenan's writing a sort of intellectual foppishness,
a love of paradox and of distinction for distinction's
sake. His great merit has always been his natural dis-
tinction, but now, in this same distinction, in the af-
fectation of views which are nothing if not exquisite,
views sifted and filtered through an infinite intellectual
experience, there is something rather self-conscious and
artificial. The reader cannot help wishing that M.
Kenan might be brought into more immediate contact
with general life itself general life as distinguished
from that horizon of pure learning which surrounds the
cabinet de travail of a Parisian scholar suspecting
that, if this could happen, some of his fine-spun doubts
and perplexities would find a very natural solution, and
some of his fallacies die a very natural death.

Philalethes, the exponent of M. Kenan's "Certain-
ties," is not so certain about some things as his friends
might have expected; but his skepticism is narrowed
down to a point just fine enough to be graceful. "In
fact," he says, "if I had been a priest, I should never
have been willing to accept a fee for my mass ; I should
have been afraid of doing as the shopkeeper who de-
livers for money an empty bag. Just so I should have
had a scruple about drawing a profit from my religious
beliefs. I should have been afraid of seeming to distrib-
ute false notes and to prevent poor people, by putting
them off with dubious hopes, from claiming their por-

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Parisian Sketches

tion in this world. These things are substantial enough
for us to talk about them, to live by them, to think of
them always ; but they are not certain enough to en-
able us to be sure that in pretending to teach them we
are not mistaken as to the quality of the goods deliv-
ered." Theophrastus, who discourses on "Probabili-
ties," takes, on the whole, a cheerful view of the future
it must be confessed with considerable abatements.
He agrees probably in a great measure with Theoc-
tistes, who remarks, "I have never said that the future
was cheerful. Who knows whether the truth is not
sad?" Theophrastus thinks that the maturity of the
world is to arrive by the expansion of science on con-
dition, indeed, that the mechanical theory of heat suc-
ceeds within five or six hundred years in inventing a
substitute for coal. If it fails and the failure is quite
probable "humanity will enter into a sort of medi-
ocrity from which she will hardly have the means to
emerge." It must be added that Theophrastus is pre-
pared to see art and beauty (as we have hitherto un-
derstood them) disappear ; "the day will perhaps come
(we already see its dawn) when a great artist, a vir-
tuous man, will be antiquated, almost useless things."
The speculations of Theoctistes, however, are much
the most curious. He imagines a development of science
so infinite and immeasurable that it will extend our re-
lations beyond the limits of the planet on which we
dwell, and he deems the function of this perfected ma-
chine to be above all the production of great men. The
great men may be so selected and sifted and improved

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that human perfection may at last concentrate itself in
one extremely superior being, who will hold all the
universe in cheerful and grateful subordination. This
is what Theoctistes calls "God being realized." With
these sentiments it is not surprising that he should not
expect that God will be realized by a democracy. He
gets into deeper water than he can always buffet, but
his style is the perfection of expression. I must quote
a few lines more. "For myself, I relish the universe
through that sort of general sentiment to which we
owe it that we are sad in a sad city, gay in a gay city.
I enjoy thus the pleasures of those given up to pleasure,
the debauchery of the debauchee, the worldliness of the
worldling, the holiness of the virtuous man, the medi-
tations of the savant, the austerity of the ascetic. By
a sort of sweet sympathy I imagine to myself that I
am their consciousness. The discoveries of the savant
are my property; the triumphs of the ambitious are
my festival. I should be sorry that anything should he
missing in this world, for I have the consciousness of
all that it contains. My only displeasure is that the
age has fallen so low that it no longer knows how to
enjoy. Then I take refuge in the past in the six-
teenth century, in the seventeenth, in antiquity ; every-
thing that has been beautiful, amiable, noble, just,
makes a sort of paradise for me. With this I defy mis-
fortune to touch me; I carry with me the charming
garden of the variety of my thoughts. 33 This paragraph
seems to me magnificent ; one would like to have written
it. The charm of M. Kenan's style is hard to define ; it

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is ethereal as a perfume. It is a style above all things
urbane, and, with its exquisite form, is suggestive of
moral graces, amenity, delicacy, generosity. Now that
Sainte-Beuve is dead, it strikes me as the most perfect
vehicle of expression actually in operation in Prance.
The only style to be compared to it is that of Mme.
Sand; but for pure quality even this must yield the
palm. Mme. Sand's style is, after all (with all respect) ,
a woman's style.

The much expected funeral of Michelet, 2 which took
place ten days ago, may not, I suppose, be spoken of as
an event of the hour; inasmuch as it conspicuously
turned out not to be an event. To keep it from being
an event was the earnest desire of Mme. Michelet and
her friends, and it was feared that the large body of
injudicious persons always on the lookout for chances
to "manifest," radically, would take conflicting views,
and that the highly unbecoming scenes which accom-
panied the recent interment of Mme. Louis Blanc an
Englishwoman and a Protestant would be repeated.
Mme. Michelet desired a secular, but not a political
funeral. It may be remembered that she had just con-
cluded, victoriously, a prolonged, painful and awkward
contest with her husband's family touching the posses-
sion of his remains. They were finally adjudged to her,
and she repaired to Cannes (where Michelet died, and
where his relatives desired him to be buried) to bring
them to Paris and consign them honorably to the soil
in which there was an impressive fitness in their re-
posing. An immense concourse of people followed the

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body to the grave, but there was perfect order and no
manifestation. Good taste, doubtless, for many excel-
lent reasons, is not always a "radical" virtue; but on
this occasion it was not wanting. It characterized espe-
cially the very eloquent address made at the grave by
M. Challemel-Lacour, 3 who as speaker had long since
won his spurs in the Assembly. His eulogy of Michelet
was a very happy combination of passion and reason.
Quietly as it was effected, however, the transfer to Paris
of the great historian's remains has made Michelet
again one of the subjects of the day, and the critics
are revising and summing up their judgments of him.
The Revue des Deux Mondes has just begun the pub-
lication of an extended essay on the subject by young
M. d'Haussonville,* the author of the series of clever
and somewhat perfidious papers upon Sainte-Beuve
which appeared more than a year ago in the same pages.
He will apparently treat Michelet more sympatheti-
cally and it is rather odd he should, considering his
highly conservative affiliations (M. d'Haussonville is
nephew of the Duke de Broglie, and great-grandson of
Mme. de Stael, 5 who certainly, if she were now living,
would not be a Republican), In talking of Sainte-
Beuve he made a very handsome show of generosity,
but in turning the page one always found that he took
back with one hand what he had given with the other*
His account of Michelet's early life is extremely inter-
esting; the great historian was a child of the people,,
in the narrowest sense of the term. His father was a.
small, struggling, unsuccessful printer, and Michelet's

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Parisian Sketches

early years were spent in a damp cellar, setting up
types with his little chapped hands. His whole youth
was a time of poverty and hard obstruction, and on
this point M. d'Haussonville quotes a few lines from a
retrospect of Michelet which are well worth repeating :
"I remember that this consummate misfortune, priva-
tions in the present, fears for the future, the enemy be-
ing but two steps off (1814) 5 and my own personal
enemies making daily sport of me, one day one Thurs-
day morning, I turned back upon myself without fire,
with the snow covering everything, and my bread for
the evening uncertain I turned back upon myself,
and without the least mixture of religious hope, had a
pure feeling of stoicism; I struck with my hand, split
open by the cold, upon my oaken table (which I have
kept ever since), and felt a virile joy in my youth and
my future."

In comparison with Michelet's early struggles to
climb the ladder of knowledge, it may seem that such a
career as that of Mme. Plessy, who has just bidden
farewell to the stage at the Theatre Franfais, offers
but a trivial interest, but certainly nothing that is
thoroughly well done has been easily done, and I am
sure that the extraordinary perfection of Mme. Plessy's
art was the fruit of a great deal of labor. Her last
appearance the other night was a very brilliant solem-
nity. She acted portions of three or four of her most
successful parts, and in conclusion, with the whole
company of the Comedie Franfaise gathered about her,
she declaimed some very good verses by M. Sully-Pru-

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dhomme. 6 She is a really irreparable loss to the stage,
which in spite of her advanced age she might for some
time have continued to adorn. Her age was not seri-
ously perceptible ; she is fif ty-seven years old and had be-
longed to the Theatre Franyais from her fifteenth year.
In 1845 she seceded, without ceremony, and repaired to
Russia, where she enjoyed fame and fortune for some
ten years. In 1855 she returned to the Comedie Fran-
faise, quite une prmcesse, making her own terms and
paying none of the fines and penalties to which she had
been legally condemned. Since then, from year to year,
her talent has been growing richer and more perfect,
and it has now a blooming maturity which might long
bid defiance to time. The especially regrettable point
is that her place will probably never be filled, for she
was the last depositary of certain traditions which can
never, in the nature of things, be renewed. She was the
perfect great lady of high comedy, as high comedy
was possible before the invention of slang. She repre-
sented certain instincts and practices which have passed
out of manners. The other night, as she finished her
verses, she took Miles. Sarah Bernhardt and Croizette
by the hands, and, with admirable grace, presented
them to the public as her substitutes. It is more than
likely that she had measured the irony of her gesture ;
for from the moment it takes two actresses to make up
a Mme. Plessy, the cause is obviously lost. Clever as
those young ladies are, they will not fill the void. Their
art is small art; Mme. Plessy ? s was great art.

There are more exhibitions, but these also are small

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art. The customary congregation of the "Refuses" 7 of
the Salon has gathered itself at Durand-Ruel's ; but I
think it can have inflicted no twinges of conscience
upon the jury of admission. It is a melancholy collec-
tion of what are called in Parisian phrase croHtes
crusts. It occasionally happens, among the "Refuses,"
that the verdict of the public helps a young painter to
his revenge upon the stony-hearted Cerberi of the
Salon; but this year the most sentimental admirer of
lost causes can find no pretext for enthusiasm. The
best things, by far, are a couple of native landscapes
by an American Mr. J. Fairman. 8 (There is no harm
in printing his name, as it is in the catalogue and on
the frames of his pictures.) They are clever, but I un-
derstand very well why a French jury should have re-
fused them. More interesting was the exhibition of
architectural projects for the Exhibition of 1878,
which was lately open for a few days at the Ecole des
Beaux Arts. Architectural drawings, to the uninitiated,
are so much darkness visible ; but the two or three main
conditions of the Exhibition are such as to help one to
infuse a certain picturesqueness into the diagrams. The
buildings are to stand on the Champ de Mars, as be-
fore, but there is now to be a great structure thrown
across the Seine, with the Pont d'lena for its founda-
tion, and the opposite hill of the Trocadero is to be
covered with the dependencies of the show. It will be a
chance for the French genius for complex arrangement
to surpass itself. The architects and economists wish
greatly, I believe, that the Exhibition were to take

Parisian Topics

place three or four years later, and so, from the bot-
tom of their hearts, do all quiet Parisians, native or
adoptive. The only people who are in a hurry are the
restaurateurs and the cab drivers.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
June IT, 1876

J67

17

PARISIAN TOPICS

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

THE LATE M. DOUDAN 5 S CORRESPONDENCE M. WADDING-

TON ? S UNIVERSITY BILL A BRILLIANT SEASON OF ITAL-
IAN OPERA VERDI'S "A'IDA" AND "REQUIEM" PER-
FORMED THE LATE GEORGE SAND

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, June 9. To people who are fond of good
letters I recommend those of the late M. Doudan, 1
which have just been published by the Comte d'Haus-
sonville, one of his principal correspondents. Good let-
ters are the most entertaining reading (to my sense)
in the world, and in these two (it must be confessed
rather formidably massive) volumes this branch of lit-
erature, so exceptionally rich in France, has received
a delightful accession. M. Doudan was not known to
fame, and his letters will not make him famous, inas-
much as their interest is of a very tranquil order and
their charm of a sort to be appreciated only by people
of delicate taste, who are always in the minority. But
they are very exquisite and they testify eloquently to
the culture, the intelligence, and the intellectual good

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manners of the circle of which their author was a mem-
ber, and of which they form, as it were, simply the
written conversations. M. Doudan was one of those
men (everyone has known a specimen) whose friends
speak of them and their powers in superlative terms,
but whom, as there is little to show for these same pow-
ers, the outside world must take on trust the men of
whom, to the end of their days, it is said that they
might do great things if they only would. They pass
away without having done anything, and the brutal
world shrugs its shoulders and observes that when peo-
ple can do something, they manage sooner or later to
do it, and that if a man stands all his life on the brink
of the stream it is safe to conclude that he does not
know how to swim. Sainte-Beuve somewhere speaks of
M. Doudan as one of the "supremes delicats" whose
ideal is placed so high that they give up ever trying
to reach it. A great many clever men doubtless belong
in this category, as well as a great many charlatans ;
but we must not forget the homely proverb which says
that to make an omelet you must break your eggs. To
write a good book one must hang one's ideal on a peg
where one can reach it. M. Doudan passed the greater
part of his life in the family of Broglie, to which he
had been introduced through being engaged as pre-
ceptor to young M. de Rocca, the son of Mme. de Stael
by her second marriage. He was an intimate friend of
the Duchess de Broglie, the daughter of Mme. de Stael ;
I believe that this lady was a saint, and that the inti-
macy was observed to go as far as an intimacy between

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a saint and an agreeable man may go. His correspond-
ents in these volumes are chiefly her children and her
son-in-law, M. d'Haussonville. The letters range from
the year 1827 to the year 1872, the period of the au-
thor's death ; many of them, year after year, are dated
from that charming chateau of Coppet, on the Lake of
Geneva, in which Mme. de Stael spent her years of
exile, and to which her descendants have continued to
resort. M. Doudan was pre-eminently a literary man ;
literature was his passion, and two thirds of his allusions
in these volumes are to books ; but he wrote very little
and published less the editor informing us that even
his magnum opus, a brief and extremely condensed
treatise on the art of style and the principles of literary
composition, which he had spent a great deal of time
in polishing and perfecting, never left his portfolio. I
believe, however, that it is now to be given to the world.
I don't know what M. Doudan's theories were, but his
practice is admirable. His own style is charming and
the amount of excellent, of exquisite writing buried in
these essentially familiar letters may excite the surprise
of a generation whose epistolary manner threatens to
savor more and more of the telegram and the postal
card. There are letters and letters ; those of M. Doudan
are decidedly "old-fashioned," but they are not in the
least ponderous. They are not formal dissertations on
the one hand, nor on the other are they marked by the
desperate vivacity of many of those social scribes who
know that their letters are to be read aloud and handed
about. They touch upon everything events of the day,

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Parisian Topics

people, books, abstract questions; some readers will
perhaps complain that they contain too little gossip,
and absolutely no scandal. They have a great deal of
humor, pitched in the minor key ; it is never quite ab-
sent, but it never rises to the height (or sinks to the
depth) of the comic. I had marked a great many pas-
sages for quotation, but I must use the privilege scant-
ily. Every now and then there is something excellently
said as when, speaking of foreign literatures, and de-
claring that one never really enters into them, or cares
to enter into them, as the natives do, that they have
always a strangeness for us, M. Doudan affirms that
"at bottom there are only two things that really please
us, the ideal or our own likeness." Excellent, too, is this
about Rousseau: "I am not surprised that he has dis-
pleased you. There is nothing sadder to see than this
lively imagination, with its strength and severity, gov-
erned by vulgar inclinations. He wished sincerely to live
according to the ideal which he saw floating before him,
but his nature rebelling too strongly, he squeezed into
his ideal all the pitiable qualities of his personal na-
ture, by conscience, by insanity, and also by a certain
perversity." And St. Augustine, he adds (whom his
correspondent appears also to have been reading), "his
confessions make one think of everything. They are
like a fine night of Africa, Great shadows, vast spaces,
and the eternal stars." M. Doudan had, as a young
man, paid a short visit to Italy, and his Italian mem-
ories kept him company for life. His allusions to Ital-
ian things are constant, and they have an almost pas-

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sionate tenderness. "A young Roman girl of the
bourgeoisie has her confessor lodging behind St.
Peter's, and in passing she thinks neither of the dome
of St. Peter's, nor of the Egyptian obelisk, nor of the
statues of Bernini, nor of the lions of Canova ; but all
these things are mingled confusedly with her real life.
She is a bright little flower on the walls of a great
monument. The sun of Rome has given her her bright-
ness, but she doesn't know it. An old English lady de-
claims as she gazes on the Roman horizon, the cata-
combs, and the pines of the Villa Pamfili ; and while the
old English lady remains ugly and pale and declama-
tory, the little Roman bourgeoise, who has never been
so wise, grows up and becomes beautiful without think-
ing of the Tarquins or the Gracchi. M. de Langsdorf ,"
he adds, "means soon to sail ; but for my part, fond as
I am of nature, I shouldn't care to go into those un-
settled parts of America. I would rather see Konigs-
berg or Nuremberg, under their grey sky, than all
those virgin forests which have never been looked at but
by lumber dealers. I am like my old English lady of
just now: I like to declaim over old times, but if today
I could be eighteen years old and have been born in
Rome, even in the Via Babuino, I would give up for-
ever all present and future declamations. But you can't
be eighteen for wishing it, and if ever I am eighteen
again I shall stay so." A short time before the Roman
revolution of 1848 he writes: "I lay my curse in ad-
vance upon all Italians who are not of an extreme mod-
eration in these hard days. But patience and modera-

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tion are rare virtues. I don't know why they give the
name of hero to those who mount a ladder under fire
and plant a flag on a wall in the midst of balls. It's a
matter of half an hour, after which you may go and lie
down on a bed of laurels freshly cut. It is only those
who have real patience and moderation who should be
called heroes. Those are the great battles battles that
last long. You have to lie for years on peach kernels,
with doubt on your right hand and on your left the
crowd, who informs you that you have no blood in your
veins, and to ascertain it, wants every now and then to
cut your throat." Lastly apropos of M. Kenan's bril-
liant first literary performances: "The truth is he is
like a young colt; he is fond of kicking up his heels.
... A man must certainly have some vague ideas ; a
clever man who has none but clear ones is a fool, who
will never come to anything; but nevertheless there
must be some solid bones to hold a living being together
when he is not of the race of the snakes. I don't see M.
Kenan's bones." M. Doudan's letters, in short, present
an interesting image of a quiet, sensitive, fastidious
man, living by preference on the shady side of life, pos-
sessing the most delicate perceptions and tastes, as well
as the most agreeable culture, but haunted by a melan-
choly sense of his ineffectiveness. His gaiety is sub-
dued ; there is a cast of autumnal haze in his sunshine.
I may add that he appears to have been a voracious
reader of English books, and to have had, in particu-
lar, an insatiable appetite for British fiction. On this
last point he was a flattering exception to his country-

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men; most French people to whom I have spoken of
English novels have made up a very wry face.

Of what is going on in the lighter realms of Parisian
activity there is no very brilliant account to give. Peo-
ple are, of course, thinking and talking much of the
dark clouds in the East, 2 but this cannot at the best
be classed among "light" subjects. M. Waddington has
just succeeded in putting through his bill restricting
to the state the power of conferring university degrees
a sensible defeat to the Catholic party. But neither
is this a light theme. The fauteuil of M. Guizot at the
Academy has just been taken possession of by his suc-
cessor, M. Dumas, the distinguished chemist and physi-
cist. 8 I am at a loss to perceive on what grounds M.
Dumas has sought a place in a purely literary body;
but in his discowrs de reception he paid a great many
compliments to literature as well as to M. Guizot so
many that stern science, I should think, would feel a
trifle jilted. I sometimes feel inclined to exclaim, in em-
ulation of Mme. Roland, "Oh, Academic Fran9aise,
what crimes are committed in thy name !" There is noth-
ing new of consequence at the theaters, and some of
them are about to close. I should like, however, in so far
as a strictly nonmusical auditor has a right to speak
of such a matter, to say a good word for the brilliant
short season of Italian opera which is just coming to
an end at the Salle Ventadour. Verdi's Aida and the
same master's lately composed Requiem * have been the
only works performed, but they have been given with
great perfection and proportionate success. The sing-

174'

Parisian Topics

ers have been the great composer's own and peculiar
quartet Mmes. Stoltz and Waldmann, and, as tenor
and baritone, MM. Masini and Medini. I don't know
when I have partaken of such a feast of vocalism. The
voice of Mme. Stoltz is phenomenal ; it seems to belong
to two persons. If you shut your eyes when she passes
from one end of her register to the other you are ready
to swear that a second singer has intervened. The liquid
contralto of Mile. Waldmann is most enchanting, but
the prize, to my sense, belongs to the admirable tenor
of M. Masini, which seems to contain the very soul of
youth and tenderness. It is deemed to be, I believe, a
very vivid echo of Mario. It is the ideal voice of one's
twentieth year ; if that time of life could always sing, it
would sing just so. I will not profess to have enjoyed
very profusely the somewhat obstreperous (from the
Italian point of view exotic) music of A'ida, but I found
the Requiem in places irresistibly moving the more so
that Signor Verdi himself stood there, conducting the
orchestra with a certain passionate manner. In the way
of further gossip of this class, there has been the dis-
tribution of the prizes at the Salon, and the bestowal
of the medal of honor upon the two figures in sculp-
ture of M. Paul Dubois, of which I lately made ap-
preciative mention. Never was an honor better earned,
and never can it have been adjudged with more un-
grudging unanimity. I have it at heart to add that the
two fantastic pictures of M. Gustave Moreau, to which
I made but a cursory allusion, the "Hercules and the
Hydra of Ternos" and the "Salome," have proved the

175

Parisian Sketches

lions of the Salon. I confess that, with myself, they
have greatly improved on acquaintance. They are very
remarkable, full of imagination, and if not of first-class
power at least of first-class subtlety.

Since I began my letter the news has come of a great
loss to literature the death of George Sand. 5 She died
in that rustic chateau of Nohant, in the old province of
Berry, which she had so often and so picturesquely de-
scribed. She had been painfully and alarmingly ill for
a number of days, and the public was prepared for the
event. It is the close of a very illustrious and very in-
teresting career, of which I must defer speaking at
length to my next writing. Mme. Sand is not, as was at
first affirmed, to be buried at Paris, but at Nohant, to
which (as I believe) somewhat inaccessible spot a nu-
merous deputation from the literary world has piously
repaired. It has been proposed, says the Figaro, to
Alexandre Dumas to pronounce her funeral oration. I
hope he will decline. Mme. Sand, admire her with what
modification we will, deserves a better fate than to
serve as a pretext for this gentleman's self-complacent
epigrams. Mme. Sand was seventy-two years of age.
She had of late lived almost exclusively in the country,
and at the time of her death had not been to Paris for
two winters. I have heard her this winter much spoken
of by persons who knew her well, and always with great
esteem. Her life had had many phases, but the longest
was that of her old age, which was very tranquil and
reasonable ; so much so as to efface the memory of cer-
tain others which had preceded it, and which had been

176

Parisian Topics

of a more questionable cast. She had always been a
singular mixture of quietude and turbulence. I am told
that she was fearfully shy ; her books are certainly of
all books the least shy. She had little conversation, and
yet her books are singularly loquacious and confiden-
tial. Her fertility was most extraordinary, and her ad-
mirers will be anxious to learn whether it has not be-
queathed some documents memoirs, reminiscences, or
narratives more explicitly fictitious which are yet to
see the light.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
July 1, 1876

177

18

GEORGE SAND

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

INCIDENTS OF HER CAREER HER TIRELESS INDUSTRY

M. RENAN'S TRIBUTE TO HER GENIUS CHARACTERISTICS
OF HER EARLIER AND LATER WORKS

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

PARIS, June 28. The newspapers, for the last fort-
night, have contained a certain number of anecdotes
about Mme. Sand ; * but they have been generally of a
rather trivial sort, and I have not gathered any that
are worth repeating. Private life in France more for-
tunate than among ourselves is still acknowledged to
have some rights which the reporter and the interviewer
are bound to respect. A Frenchman often makes sur-
prising confidences to the public about himself, but as
a rule he is not addicted to telling tales about his
neighbor. Mme. Sand, in the memoirs which she pub-
lished twenty years ago, lifted the veil from her per-
sonality with a tolerably unshrinking hand (though to
the admirers of what is called scandal she gave very
little satisfaction) ; and yet for the last thirty years of
her life, she was one of the most shade-loving and re-

178

George Sand

tiring of celebrities. Her life, indeed, was almost en-
tirely in her books, and it is there that one must look
for it. She was essentially a scribbler ; she wrote unceas-
ingly from the publication of her first novel to the day
of her death, and she had always been fond above all
things of a quiet life, even during that portion of her
career in which our Anglo-Saxon notions of "quiet-
ness" are supposed to have been most effectively vio-
lated. She was very intimate at one time with Alfred
de Musset, and I have heard that this charming poet,
by right of his membership in the genus irritabile,
sometimes found it more than his nerves could endure
to see the author of Consuelo sit down to her perpetual
manuscript at the most critical hours of their some-
what troubled friendship. But Mme. Sand wrote for
her bread, and her remarkable power of imaginative
abstraction must help to explain the very large amount
of work that she achieved. She was also very intimate
with Prosper Merimee, and I have been told that very
early one cold winter morning he perceived her, with
a handkerchief on her head, lighting the fire to resume
her literary tasks. He also, it appears, had nerves ; the
spectacle disturbed them he himself was not thinking
of getting about his labors yet awhile and from that
moment the intimacy ceased. Mme. Sand had spent a
large portion of her life at Nohant, in the Berry, in
the plain old country house which she described so
charmingly in L'Histoire de Ma Vie, and for which
and for its (I believe) rather meager setting of natural
beauty she appears to have had a singularly intense

179

Parisian Sketches

affection. As she advanced in life, Nohant became more
and more her home, and her visits to Paris were brief.
Her house was very hospitable, and under her own roof
she was never without society. She had worked very
hard, and she had made no fortune; she still earned
her income an income which at the bottom, as they
say, of an old French province is still considered easy,
but which in America, as in England, would not be
thought in fair proportion to the writer's industry and
eminence. Mme. Sand made, I believe, between six and
seven thousand dollars a year. She was very silent, and
had little assurance of manner. People who knew her
well have told me that she looked a great deal on the
ground, and seemed preoccupied ; that one felt shut off
from her by a sort of veil or film. Occasionally this veil
was lifted, she found her voice, and talked to very good
purpose. This characterization corresponds with a
phrase which one of her heroes, in I forget what novel,
applies to one of her heroines the heroine being an
idealized portrait of Mme. Sand herself. He calls her
a sphmcc bon enfant "a good-natured sphinx." In
spite of her advanced age she was seventy-two Mme.
Sand's vigor had not failed at the time of the sudden
illness which ended in her death. Her activity was great,
and her faculties unimpaired. I saw a letter, the other
day, written a few weeks before she died, in which she
declared that her eyesight was better than when she
was fifty, and that she went upstairs as fast as her dog.
She was carried off by an acute attack of a malady
which she had at first neglected. Her last audible

180

George Sand

words on her deathbed were characteristic of one who
had loved nature passionately, and described it al-
most incomparably "Laissez verdure." The allusion
was apparently to some wild herbage in the corner of
the village churchyard in which she expressed a wish
to rest. In spite of her complete rupture, early in life,
with Catholicism in spite of Spiridion, Mademoiselle
La Qumtmie, and numberless other expressions of re-
ligious independence Mme. Sand was buried from the
little church of Nohant, and the cure performed the
service. Her family had the good taste to ask permis-
sion of the Bishop of Bourges, and the Bishop had the
good taste to answer that if she had not positively re-
fused the sacraments he saw no objection. What made
it good taste in Mme. Sand's family (it was poor logic)
was the fact that she was greatly beloved by the coun-
try people, that she had been held in great esteem by
the prior generation, that these people were numeri-
cally her chief mourners, and that it would have per-
plexed and grieved them not to see her buried in the
only fashion of which they recognized the impressive-
ness. Alexandre Dumas did not pronounce a funeral
oration, though he was, with Prince Napoleon, one of
the pallbearers. A short address by Victor Hugo was
read he not being personally present. It had all of his
latter-day magniloquence, but it contained no phrase
so happy in its eloquence as one that I find in a letter
from Ernest Renan, published in the Temps a few days
after Mme. Sand's death. The last lines she had writ-
ten were a short notice of M. Kenan's new book, the

181

Parisian Sketches

Dialogues Philosophiques. "I am touched to the bottom
of my heart," he says, "to have been the last to pro-
duce a vibration of that sonorous soul which was, as it
were, the Aeolian harp of our time." Persons who have
read Mme. Sand with a certain amount of sympathy
will find it just, as well as fanciful, to call her soul
"sonorous." It is an excellent description of her in-
tellectual temperament. A few other fine lines in M.
Kenan's letter are worth quoting: "Mme. Sand went
through all visions, smiled at them all, believed in them
all; her practical judgment may occasionally have gone
astray, but as an artist she never deceived herself. Her
works are truly the echo of our age. When this poor
nineteenth century which we abuse so much is gone, it
will be heard ancj eagerly looked into, and much one
day will be forgiven it. George Sand then will rise up
as our interpreter. The age has not had a wound with
which her heart has not bled, not an ailment of which
she has not harmoniously complained." I suspect that
M. Renan has not perused any very great number of
Mme. Sand's fictions, but this is none the less very
finely said.

I have been refreshing my memory of some of George
Sand's earlier novels, which I confess I do not find as
easy reading as I once did. But taking the later ones
as well they are a very extraordinary and splendid
series, and certainly one of the great literary achieve-
ments of our time. Some people, I know, cannot read
Mme. Sand; she has no illusion for them and but a
moderate amount of charms; but I think such people

182

George Sand

are to be pitied they lose a great pleasure. She was
an improvisatrice, raised to a very high power; she
told stories as a nightingale sings. No novelist answers
so well to the childish formula of "making up as you
go along." Other novels seem meditated, pondered,
calculated, thought out, and elaborated with a certain
amount of trouble ; but the narrative with Mme. Sand
always appears to be an invention of the moment, flow-
ing from a mind which a constant process of quiet con-
templation, absorption, and revery keeps abundantly
supplied with material. It is a sort of general emana-
tion, an intellectual evaporation. There had been plenty
of improvisation before the author of Consuelo, but
it had never been and it has never been in other hands
of so fine a quality. She had a natural gift of style
which is certainly one of the most remarkable of our
day; her diction from the first was ripe and flexible,
and seemed to have nothing to learn from practice. The
literary form of her writing has always been exquisite ;
and this alone would have sufficed to distinguish it
from the work of the great body of clever scribblers
who spin their two or three plots a year. Some of her
novels are very inferior to others ; some of them show
traces of weariness, of wandering attention, of a care-
less choice of subject; but the manner, at the worst,
never sinks below a certain high level the tradition
of good writing is never lost. In this bright, voluminous
envelope, it must be confessed that Mme. Sand has
sometimes wrapped up a rather flimsy kernel ; some of
her stories will not bear much thinking over. But her

- 183

Parisian Sketches

great quality from the first was the multiplicity of her
interests and the activity of her sympathies. She passed
through a succession of phases, faiths, and doctrines
political, religious, moral, social, personal and to each
she gave a voice which the conviction of the moment
made eloquent. She gave herself up to each as if it were
to be final, and in every case she turned her steps be-
hind her. Sainte-Beuve, who as an artist relished her
but slenderly, says somewhere, in allusion to her, that
"no one had ever played more fairly and openly at the
great game of life." It has been said wittily, in refer-
ence to Buffon's well-known axiom, that "the style is
the man" (which by the way is a misquotation), that
of no one was this dictum ever so true as of Mme. Sand ;
but I incline to believe, with the critic in whose pages
I find this mot, that at bottom the man was always
Mme. Sand herself. She accepted as much of every in-
fluence as suited her, and when she had written a novel
or two about it she ceased to care about it. This proves
her, doubtless, to have been a decidedly superficial
moralist; but it proves her to have been a born ro-
mancer. It is by the purely romantic side of her pro-
ductions that she will live. It is a misfortune that she
pretended to moralize to the extent that she did, for
about moral matters her head was not at all clear. It
had now and then capital glimpses and inspirations,
but her didacticism has always seemed to me what an
architectural drawing would be, executed by a person
who should turn up his nose at geometry. Mme. Sand's
straight lines are straight by a happy chance and

184 '

George Sand

for people of genius there are so many happy chances.
She was without a sense of certain differences the dif-
ference between the pure and the impure the things
that are possible for people of a certain delicacy, and
the things that are not. When she struck the right
notes, and so long as she continued to strike them, the
result was charming, but a sudden discord was always
possible. Sometimes the right note was admirably pro-
longed as for instance in her masterpiece, Consuelo,
in which during three long volumes, if I remember
rightly, the charming heroine adheres strictly to the
straight line. After all, Mme. Sand's "tendency" novels,
as the Germans call such works, constitute but the
minor part of her literary bequest ; as she advanced in
life she wrote her stories more and more for the story's
sake, and attempted to prove nothing more alarming
than that human nature is on the whole tolerably noble
and generous. After this pattern she produced a long
list of masterpieces. Her imagination seemed gifted
with perpetual youth; the freshness of her invention
was marvelous. Her novels have a great many faults ;
they lack three or four qualities which the realistic
novel of the last thirty or forty years, with its great
successes, has taught us to consider indispensable. They
are not exact nor probable; they contain few living
figures; they produce a limited amount of illusion.
Mme. Sand created no figures that have passed into
common life and speech; her people are usually only
very picturesque, very voluble, and very "high-toned"
shadows. But the shadows move to such a persuasive

185

Parisian Sketches

music that we watch them with interest. The art of
narration is extraordinary. This was Mme. Sand's
great art. The recital moves along with an evenness,
a lucidity, a tone of seeing, feeling, knowing every-
thing, a reference to universal tilings, a sentimental
authority, which makes the reader care for the char-
acters in spite of his incredulity and feel anxious about
the story in spite of his impatience. He feels that the
author holds in her hands a stringed instrument com-
posed of the chords of the human soul.

Paris is settling herself for her summer siesta, and
all disturbing sounds are daily growing fainter. There
is indeed a vague booming of cannon, actual and pros-
pective, beyond the eastern horizon, and her sleep may
have troubled dreams. The race for the Grand Prix
came off some three weeks ago, and the Grand Prix,
I believe, is the high-water mark of Parisian animation.
Since then the tide has rapidly ebbed. I have left my-
self no space to speak how profanely soever of this
equine contest, and I have the opportunity to devote
but a few lines to the Review of the 15th of June. I
witnessed the latter ceremony from a rickety straw-
bottomed chair, upon which I stood for three or four
hours in a very hot sun ; but in spite of my discomfort
I thought the Review entertaining which is speaking
handsomely. It was held on the immense race grounds
at Longchamp, and consisted of a simple march past
of 40,000 troops or so stationed in Paris or immedi-
ately near it. The day was charming, and the crowd
enormous, and Marshal MacMahon and his staff and

186

George Sand

escort formed a very glittering array. The little red
legs seemed to me to march very neatly, and the ar-
tillery to thunder by with a proper amount of method
in its madness; the dragoons and cuirassiers, on the
other hand, did not strike me as sitting their horses
like the young Greeks on the friezes of the Parthenon.
But the whole show, I believe, was pronounced credit-
able, and, asking no oversearching questions of it, I
was quite willing to exclaim, with the Grand Duchess
of Grolstein "Ah, que j'aime les militaires!"

HENRY JAMES, JR.
July 22, 1876

187

19

SUMMER IN FRANCE x

Letter from Henry James, Jr.

PARIS IN SUMMERTIME FESTIVE ASPECT OF THE BOULE-
VARDS DINING AT AUTEUIL AND AT THE BOIS THE

ATLANTIC AT HAVRE THE CATHEDRAL IN ROUEN THE

CHURCH OF ST. OUEN

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

HAVRE, July 22. It is quite in the nature of things
that a Parisian correspondence should have flagged
during the last few weeks ; for even the most brilliant
of capitals, when the summer has fairly marked her
for its own, affords few topics to the chronicler. To
a chronicle of small beer such a correspondence almost
literally finds itself reduced. The correspondent con-
sumes a goodly number of these narrow mugfuls of
this fluid, known in Paris as "bocks," and from the
shadiest corner of the coolest cafe he can discover
watches the glaring asphalt grow more largely inter-
spaced. There is little to do or to see, and therefore
little to write about. There is in fact only one thing
to do, namely, to get out of Paris. The lively imagina-
tion of the correspondent anticipates his departure and

188

Summer in France

takes its flight to one of the innumerable watering
places whose charms at this season are set forth in
large yellow and pink placards affixed to all the empty
walls. They order this matter, like so many others,
much better in France. Here you have not, as with us,
to hunt up the "summer retreat' 5 about which you de-
sire information in a dense alphabetical list in the col-
umns of a newspaper ; you are familiar with its merits
for three weeks before you start you have seen them
half a dozen times a day emblazoned along the line of
your customary walk, as vivid and substantial as the
hand and seal of the corporation of the Casino can
make them. If you are detained in Paris, however, after
luckier mortals have departed your reflections upon
the fate of the luckless mortals who do not depart at
all are quite another question, demanding another
chapter I don't know that it makes you much happier
to peruse these high-toned posters, which seem to flut-
ter with the breezes of Houlgate and fitretat. You must
take your consolation where you can find it, and it
must be added that of all great cities Paris is the most
tolerable in hot weather. It is true that the asphalt
has a way of liquefying to about the consistency and
the temperature of molten lava, and it is true that the
brilliant limestone of which the city is built reflects the
sun with uncomfortable fierceness. It is also true that
of a summer evening you pay a penalty for living in
the best lighted capital in the world. The inordinate
amount of gas in all the thoroughfares heats and thick-
ens the atmosphere, and makes you feel of a July night

- 189

Parisian Sketches

as if you were in a vast concert hall. If you look down
at such a time upon the central portions of Paris from
a high window in a remoter quarter, you see them
wrapped in a sort of lurid haze of the devil's own brew-
ing. But, on the other hand, there are a hundred per-
suasions to keeping out of doors. You are not obliged
to sit on a "stoop" or on a curbstone, as in New York.
The boulevards are a long chain of cafes, each one
with its little promontory of chairs and tables project-
ing into the sea of asphalt. These promontories are
doubtless not exactly islands of the blessed, peopled
though some of them may be with sirens addicted to
beer, but they may help you to pass a hot evening.
Then you may dine in the Champs filysees at a table
spread under the trees, beside an ivied wall, and almost
believe you are in the country. This illusion, imperfect
as it is, is a luxury and must be paid for accordingly ;
the dinner is not so good as at a restaurant on the
boulevard, and is considerably dearer, and there is
after all not much difference in sitting with one's feet
in dusty gravel or on a sanded floor. But the whole
situation is more idyllic. I indulged in a cheap idyl the
other day by taking the penny steamer down the Seine
to Auteuil (a very short sail), and dining at what is
called in Parisian parlance a guinguette on the bank
of the stream. It was a very humble style of entertain-
ment, but the most frantic pursuit of pleasure can do
no more than succeed, and this was a success. The Seine
at Auteuil is wide and is spanned by a stately tiaduct
of two tiers of arches, which stands up against the sky

190-

Summer in France

in a picturesque and monumental manner. Your table
is spread under a trellis which scratches your head
spread chiefly with fried fish and an old man who
looks like a very high-toned political exile conies and
stands before it and sings a doleful ditty on the respect
due to white hairs. You testify by the bestowal of a
couple of coppers to the esteem with which his own
inspire you, and he is speedily replaced by a lad with
one arm, who treats you to something livelier: "A la
bonne heure; parlez-moi de fa!"

You eventually return to Paris on the top of a
horsecar. It is a very different affair to go out and
dine at the Bois de Boulogne, at the charming restau-
rant which is near the cascade and the Longchamp race
course. Here are no ballad singers, but stately trees
picturesquely grouped, and making long evening shad-
ows on a lawn, and irreproachable tables, and carriages
rolling up behind high-stepping horses, and depositing
all sorts of ladies. The drive back through the wood at
night is most charming, and the coolness of the air ex-
treme, however hot you may be still certain to find the
city.

The best thing, therefore, is not to go back. I write
these lines at an inn at Havre, before a window which
frames the picture of the seaward path of the transat-
lantic steamers. One of the great black ships is at this
moment painted on the canvas, very near, and beginning
its outward journey. I watch it to the right-hand ledge
of the window, which is as far as a poor sailor need
be expected to follow it. The hotel at Havre is called,

191

Parisian Sketches

for mysterious reasons, Frascati reasons which I give
up the attempt to fathom, so undiscoverable are its
points of analogy with the lovely village of the same
name which nestles among the olives of the Roman
hills. The locality has its charms, however. It is very
agreeable, for instance, at the end of a hot journey,
to sit down to dinner in a great open cage, hung over
the Atlantic, and, while the sea breeze cools your wine,
watch the swiftly moving ships pass before you like the
figures on the field of a magic lantern. It is pleasant
also to open your eyes in the early dawn, before the
light is intense, and without moving your head on the
pillow, enjoy the same clear outlook on the ocean high-
way. In the vague dusk, with their rapid gliding, the
sailing vessels look like the ghosts of wrecked ships.
Most seaports are picturesque, and Havre is not the
least so; but my enjoyment has been not of my goal,
but of my journey. My head is full of the twenty-four
hours I have just passed at Rouen, and of the charm-
ing sail down the Seine to Honfleur. Rouen is a city
of very ancient renown, and yet I confess I was not
prepared to find so magnificent a little town. 2 The
traveler who treads the Rouen streets at the present
day sees but the shadow of their former picturesque-
ness; for the broom of M. Haussmann has swept
through the city, and a train of "embellishments" has
followed in its track. The streets have been widened
and straightened, and the old houses gems of medieval
domestic architecture which formed the peculiar
treasure of the city, have been more than decimated.

192

Summer in France

A great deal remains, however to American eyes a
very great deal. The cathedral, the churches, and the
Palais de Justice are alone a splendid group of monu-
ments, and a stroll through the streets reveals a collec-
tion of brown and sculptured f aades, of quaintly tim-
bered gables, of curious turrets and casements and
doorways, which still may be called rich. Every now
and then a good long stretch of duskiness and crooked-
ness delights the sentimental traveler, who is to pass
but a couple of nights at Rouen, and who does not care
if his favorite adjective is balanced with another epi-
thet also beginning with a p. It is nothing to him that
the picturesque is pestiferous. It is everything to him
that the great front of the cathedral is magnificently
battered, and heavy, and impressive. It has been de-
faced on a vast scale, and is now hardly more than a
collection of empty niches. I do not mean, of course,
that the wanton tourist rejoices in the absence of the
statues which once filled them, but up to the present
moment, at least, he is not sorry that the f a9ade has
not been restored. It consists of a sort of screen, pierced
in the center with a huge wheel window, crowned with
a pyramid of chiseled needles and spires, flanked with
two turrets capped with tall empty canopies, and cov-
ered, generally, with sculptures bas-relief, statues,
and ornaments. On each side of it rise two great towers,
one a rugged mass of early Norman work, with little
ornament save its hatcheted closed arches, and its
great naked base as huge and white as the bottom of
a chalk cliff ; the other a specimen of sixteenth-century

193

Parisian Sketches

gothic, extremely flamboyant and elegant and con-
founding to the eye. The sides of the cathedral are as
yet more or less imbedded in certain black and dwarfish
old houses, but if you pass around them by a long de-
tour, you arrive at two superb lateral porches. The
so-called Portail des Libraires, in especial, on the
northern side, is a magnificent affair, sculptured from
summit to base (it is now restored), and preceded by
a long forecourt, in which the guild of booksellers used
to hold its musty traffic. From here you can see the
immense central tower, perched above the junction of
the transepts and the nave, and crowned with a gigan-
tic iron spire lately erected to replace one which was
destroyed by lightning in the early part of the century.
This gaunt pyramid has the drawback, to American
eyes, of resembling too much the tall fire towers which
are seen in transatlantic cities, and its dimensions are
such that, viewed from a distance, it fairly makes little
Rouen look top-heavy. Behind the choir within is a
beautiful lady-chapel, and in this chapel are two en-
chanting works of art. The larger and more striking
of these is the tomb of the two Cardinals d'Amboise, 8
uncle and nephew, the elder, if I mistake not, Minister
of Francis I. It consists of a shallow, oblong recess in
the wall, lined with gilded and fretted marble, and cor-
niced with delicate little statues. Within the recess the
figures of the two cardinals are kneeling with folded
hands and ruggedly earnest faces, their long robes
spread out behind them with magnificent amplitude.
They are full of life, dignity, and piety ; they look like

194

Summer in France

portraits of Holbein transmuted into marble. The base
of the monument is composed of a series of admirable
little images representing the cardinal and other vir-
tues, and the effect of the whole work is admirably
grave and rich. The discreet traveler will never miss
an opportunity to come into a great church at even-
tide the hour when his fellow travelers, less discreet,
are lingering over the table d'hote, when the painted
windows glow with a deeper splendor, when the long
wand of the beadle, slowly tapping the pavement, or
the shuffle of the old sacristan, has a ghostly resonance
along the empty nave, and three or four work-weary
women, before a dusky chapel, are mumbling for the
remission of unimaginable sins. At this hour, at Rouen,
the tomb of the Duke de Breze, husband of Diana of
Poitiers, placed opposite to the monument I have just
described, seemed to me the most beautiful thing in the
world. It is presumably the work of the charming six-
teenth-century sculptor, Jean Ponjon, and it bears the
stamp of his graceful and inventive talent. The de-
ceased is lying on his back almost naked, with a part
of his shroud bound in a knot about his head a real-
istic but not a repulsive image of death. At his head
kneels the amiable Diana, in sober garments, all de-
cency and devotion; at his feet stands the Virgin, a
charming young woman with a charming child- Above,
on another tier, the subject of the monument is repre-
sented in the fullness of life, dressed as for a tourna-
ment, bestriding a high-stepping war horse, riding
forth like a Roland or a Galahad. The architecture of

195

Parisian Sketches

the tomb is most graceful and the subordinate figures
admirable, but the image of the dead Duke is altogether
a masterpiece. The other evening, in the solemn still-
ness and the fading light of the great cathedral, it
seemed irresistibly human and touching. The spectator
felt a sort of impulse to smooth out the shroud and
straighten the helpless hands.

The second church of Rouen, St. Ouen, the beautiful
and harmonious, has no monuments of this value, but
it offers within a higher interest than the cathedral.
Without, it looks like an English abbey, scraped and
restored, disencumbered of huddling neighbors and
surrounded on three sides by a beautiful garden. Seen
to this excellent advantage it is one of the noblest of
churches ; but within, it is one of the most fascinating.
I am always, in architectural matters, very much of
the opinion of the last speaker; the last fine building
I have seen seems to me for the time the finest possible.
This is deplorable levity; yet I risk the affirmation
apropos of St. Ouen. I can imagine no more consum-
mate combination of lightness and majesty. Its pro-
portions bring tears to the eyes. I have left myself
space only to recommend the sail down the Seine from
Rouen to the mouth of the stream; but I recommend
it in the highest terms. The heat was extreme and the
little steamer most primitive, but the river is as pic-
turesque as one could wish. It makes an infinite num-
ber of bends, and corners, and angles, rounded by a
charming vegetation. Abrupt and rocky hills go with
it all the way hills with cornfields lying in their hol-

196

Summer in France

lows, and forests crowning their tops. Out of the for-
ests peep old manors, and beneath, between the hills
and the stream, are high-thatched farmsteads, lying
deep in their meadows and orchards, cottages palisaded
with hollyhocks, gray old Norman churches, and villas
shaded with enormous trees. It is a land of peace and
plenty, and remarkable to Anglo-Saxon eyes for the
English-looking details of its scenery. I noticed a hun-
dred places where one might have been in Kent as well
as in Normandy. In fact it is almost better than Kent,
for Kent has no Seine. At the last the river becomes
unmistakably an arm of the sea, and as a river, there-
fore, less interesting. But crooked little Honfleur, with
its miniature port, clinging to the side of a cliff as
luxuriant as one of the headlands of the Mediterranean,
is a picturesque last incident,

HENRY JAMES, JR.
August 12, 1876

197

20

f*

A FRENCH WATERING PLACE x

Letter 'from Henry James, Jr.

ETRETAT ON THE COAST OF NORMANDY ITS SIMPLICITY

AND ATTRACTIONS SCENERY THE BLUFFS CUSTOMS

OF VISITORS JACQUES OFFENBACH

[FROM A REGULAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE"]

ETRETAT, Aug. 4. The coast of Normandy and
Picardy, from Trouville to Boulogne, is a chain of
what the French call bathing stations, each with its
particular claim to patronage. The grounds of the
claim are in some cases not particularly obvious; but
they are generally found to reside in the fact that if
the locality is nasty, it is also cheap. There are the
places that are dear and brilliant, like Trouville and
Dieppe, and places that are cheap and dreary, like
Fecamp and Cabourg. Then there are the places that
are both cheap and pleasant. This delightful combina-
tion of qualities may be found in the modest station
de 'bains from which I write these lines. At Eltretat you
may enjoy some of the finest cliff scenery it has been
my fortune to behold, and you may breakfast and dine
at the principal hotel for the sum of five and a half

198

A French Watering Place

francs a day. You may engage a room in the town
over a butcher's shop, a tailor's or a laundress's at a
rate that will depend upon your talent fo,r driving a
bargain, but that in no case will be exorbitant. Add to
this your subscription to the Casino, which, for the
season, will amount to some $8.00 or $9.00, your few
coppers daily for the hire of your bathing toggery, and
your matutinal subsidy to the lame beggar at the be-
ginning of the beach, and you have a list of all your
possible expenses at fitretat. You wear old clothes, you
walk in canvas shoes, you deck your head with a fisher-
man's cap (when made of white flannel these articles
may be extolled for their coolness, convenience, and
picturesqueness), you lie on the pebbly strand most
of the day, watching the cliffs, the waves, and the
bathers ; in the evening you loaf about the Casino, and
you keep monkish hours. Though fitretat enjoys great
and deserved popularity, I see no symptoms of the de-
cline of these simple fashions no menace of the in-
vasion of luxury. A little more luxury, indeed, might
be imported without doing any harm; though after
all we soon learn that it is an idle enough prejudice
that has hitherto prevented us from keeping our soap
in a sugar dish and closing our clothes press with a
stone. From a Parisian point of view, Etretat is cer-
tainly primitive, but it would be affectation on the part
of an American to pretend that he was not agreeably
surprised to find a "summer resort," in which he had
been warned that he would have to rough it, so com-
pletely appointed and so intelligently organized.

199

Parisian Sketches

Etretat may be primitive, but fitretat is French, and
therefore Etretat is "administered." The place strikes
me as a rather happy combination of smoothness and
roughness. It weans you from the corruptions of civili-
zation, but it lets you down gently upon the bosom of
nature; it doesn't dump you there with the brutality
observable upon the coast of Maine and of Massachu-
setts.

Etretat, like most of the French watering places, has
a brief history. Twenty years ago it was but a cluster
of fishing huts. A group of artists and literary people
were its first colonists, and Alphonse Karr 2 became the
mouthpiece of their enthusiasm. In vulgar phrase, he
wrote up the place, and he lives in legend, at the present
hour, as the genius locL The main street is named after
him; the gable of the chief inn the classic Hotel
Blanquet is adorned with a colored medallion repre-
senting his cropped head and long beard; the shops
are stocked with his photographs and with pictures of
his villa. I don't know whether, like the hero of Mrs.
Shelley's Frankenstein, he became appalled at the
monster he had created, and felt that he had suc-
ceeded too well; but of late years he has withdrawn
from fitretat. The artistic fraternity, however, still
haunt the place, and it enjoys also the favor of theatri-
cal people, three or four of whom, having retired upon
their laurels, possess villas here. The largest luminary
in this line is M. Jacques Offenbach, 8 who, I believe,
has for some time lived here, and who may be seen in
the evenings in the Casino, sitting in quiet attitudes,

200

A French Watering Place

and, to one's extreme surprise, not shaking his legs,
making play with his eyes, or indulging in any degree
in that familiar quality of gesticulation with which his
name is so invariably associated. From my open win-
dow, as I write these lines, I look out and over a little
cluster of clean housetops at the long green flank of
the downs, as it slopes down to the town from the sum-
mit of the cliffs. To the right is the top of an old
storm-twisted grove of oaks in the heart of which
stands a picturesque farmhouse ; then comes the sharp,
even outline of the down, with its side spotted with little
flat bushes and wrinkled with winding paths, along
which, here and there, I see a bright figure moving ; on
the left, above the edge of the cliff, stands a bleak little
chapel to our Lady of the fishing folk. Just here a
most provoking chimney starts up and cuts off my view
of the downward plunge of the cliff, showing me but a
gleam of its white, fantastic profile, and a bar of blue
ocean beside it. But there is not far to go to see with-
out impediments. Three minutes' walk along the Rue
Alphonse Karr, where every house is a shop, and every
house has lodgers above it, who scramble bedward by
a ladder and trapdoor, brings you to the little pebbly
bay where the cliffs fall and the foreign life of fitretat
goes forward. At one end are the small fishing smacks,
with their green sides and their black sails, resting
crookedly upon the stones ; at the other is the Casino,
and the two or three tiers of bathing houses on the slope
of the beach in front of it. This beach may be said to
be tretat. It is so steep and stony as to make circu-

201

Parisian Sketches

lation impossible ; one's only course is to plant a camp
chair among the stones or to look for a soft spot in
the pebbles, and to abide in the position so chosen ; and
yet it is the spot in Etretat most sacred to tranquil
pleasure.

The French do not treat their beaches as we do ours
as places for a glance, a dip, or a trot, places ani-
mated simply during the couple of hours of bathing
time and wrapped in natural desolation for the rest
of the twenty-four. They love them, they adore them,
they take possession of them, they encamp upon them.
The people here sit upon the beach from morning till
night; whole families come early and establish them-
selves, with umbrellas and rugs, books and work. The
ladies get sunburnt and don't mind it; the gentlemen
smoke interminably; the children roll over on the
pointed pebbles and stare at the sun like young eagles.
(The children's lot I rather commiserate; they have
no wooden spades and pails; they have no sand to
delve and grub in ; they can dig no trenches and canals
nor see the creeping tide flood them.) The great occu-
pation and amusement is the bathing, which has many
entertaining features (I allude to it as a spectacle),
especially for strangers, who keep an eye upon na-
tional idiosyncrasies. The French take their bathing
very seriously; supplemented by opera-bouffe in the
evening at the Casino, it quite fills out their lives. The
spectators and the bathers commingle in graceful pro-
miscuity; it is the freedom of the golden age. The
whole beach seems to be a large family party, in a

202

A French Watering Place

family which should have radical views as regards some
prudish prejudices. There is more or less costume, but
the minimum rather than the maximum is found to pre-
vail. Bathers come out of their dressing houses wrapped
in short white sheets, which they deposit on the stones ;
and thus they take an air bath for some minutes, be-
fore entering the water. Like everything in France, the
bathing is excellently managed, and you feel the firm
hand of a paternal and overlooking government the
moment you issue from your hut. The government will
on no consideration consent to letting you get drowned.
There are six or eight worthy old sons of Neptune on
the beach perfect amphibious creatures who, if you
are a newcomer, immediately accost you and demand
pledges that you know how to swim. If you do not, they
give you much excellent advice, guide your infant
steps, and keep an eye on you while you are in the
water. They are, moreover, obliged to render you any
service you may demand to pour buckets of water
over your head, to fetch your bathing sheet and your
slippers, to carry your wife and children into the sea,
to dip them, cheer and sustain them, to teach them how
to swim and how to dive, to hover about, in short, like
trickling Providences. At a short distance from the
shore are two boats, freighted with more of these ma-
rine divinities, who remain there perpetually, and take
it as a personal offense if you catch a cramp or venture
out too far.

There has, I believe, never been a life lost in bathing
at Etretat, and this fair record is a part of the fortune

Parisian Sketches

of the town. I see no reason why it should ever be tar-
nished, however, for the French are noticeably good
swimmers. Everyone swims, and swims well men,
women, and children. I have been especially struck
with the prowess of the ladies, who take the neatest
possible headers from the two long plunging boards
which are rigged in the water upon high wheels. As
you recline upon the beach, you may observe Mile. X. 4
issue from her cabin Mile. X., the actress of the
Palais Royal Theater, whom you have seen and ap-
plauded behind the footlights. She wears a bathing
dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I
have called the minimum has been appreciably scanted ;
but she trips down, surveying her breezy nether limbs.
"C'est convemable, j'espere, eh?" says Mademoiselle,
and trots up the springboard which projects over the
waves with one end uppermost, like a great seesaw. She
balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial dive,
executing on the way the most graceful of somersaults.
This performance Mile. X. repeats during the ensuing
hour, at intervals of five minutes, and leaves you, as
you lie tossing little stones into the water, to ponder
the curious and delicate question why a lady may go
so far as to put herself into a single scant, clinging
garment and take a straight leap, head downward, be-
fore 300 spectators, without violation of propriety
leaving the impropriety to begin with her turning over
in the air in such a way that for five seconds her head
is upward. The logic of the matter is mysterious ; white
and black are divided by a hair. But the fact remains

204

A French Watering Place

that virtue is on one side of the hair and vice on the
other. There are some days here so still and radiant,
however, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such
an air and such a sea, might be diluted into innocence.
The sea is as blue as melted sapphires, and the ragged
white faces of the bordering cliffs look like a setting
of silver. Everyone is idle, amused, good-natured ; the
bathers take the water as easily as mermen and mer-
maids. The bathing men in the two bateaux de mrveil-
Icmce have taken aboard a freight of rosy children,
more or less chubbily naked, and they have nailed a
gay streamer and a rude nosegay to their low mast-
heads. The swimmers dip and rise, circling round the
boats and playing with the children. Every now and
then they grasp the sides of the boats and cling to
them in a dozen harmonious attitudes, making one
fancy that Eugene Delacroix's great picture of Dante
and Virgil on the Styx, with the damned trying to
scramble into Charon's bark, has been repainted as a
scene on one of the streams of Paradise. The swimmers
are not the damned, but the blessed, and the demon-
strative French babies are the cherubs. The Casino at
fitretat is a modest but respectable institution, with a
sufficiently capacious terrace, directly upon the beach,
a cafe, a billiard room, a ballroom which may also
be used as a theater, a reading room, and a salon de
conversation. It is in very good taste, without any at-
tempt at gilding or mirrors ; the ballroom, in fact, is
quite a masterpiece, with its charm of effect produced
simply by unpainted woods and happy proportions.

205-

Parisian Sketches

Three evenings in the week a bland young man in a
white cravat plays waltzes on a grand piano; but the
effect is not that of an American "hop," owing to the
young ladies of France not being permitted to dance
in public places. They may only sit wistfully beside
their mammas. Imagine a "hop" at which sweet seven-
teen is condemned to immobility. The burden of the
gaiety is sustained by three or four robust English
maidens and as many lighter-footed Americans. On the
other evenings a weak little operatic troupe gives light
specimens of the lyric drama, the privilege of enjoying
which is covered by one's subscription to the Casino. The
French hurry in joyously (four times a week in July and
August !) at the sound of the bell, but I can give no re-
port of the performances. Sometimes I look through the
lighted windows and see, on the diminutive stage, a short-
skirted young woman with one hand on her heart and
the other persuasively extended. Through the hot, un-
pleasant air comes a little ghost of a roulade. I turn
away and walk on the terrace and listen to the ocean
vocalizing to the stars. But there are (by daylight)
other walks at fitretat than the terrace, and no account
of the place is complete without some commemoration
of the superb cliffs. They are the finest I have seen;
their fantastic needles and buttresses, at either end of
the little bay, give to fitretat a striking individuality.
Their height is magnificent ; if a poor eye for measure-
ment is to be trusted, I should say it was, on an aver-
age, an affair of 200 feet. In spite of there being no
sands, a persistent admirer of nature will walk a long

206 *

A French Watering Place

distance upon the tiresome sea margin of pebbles for
the sake of being under them and visiting some of their
quiet caves and shadowed corners. Seen thus from di-
rectly below, they look stupendous; they rise up like
certain great mountain walls in the Alps. They are
marvelously white and straight and smooth ; they have
the tone and something of the surface of time-yellowed
marble, and here and there, at their summits, they
break into quaint little pinnacles and turrets. But to
be on the top of them is even better; here you may
walk over miles of grassy, breezy down, with the woods,
contorted and sea-stunted, of old farmsteads on your
land side (the farmhouses here have all a charming
way of being buried in a wood, like the castle of the
Sleeping Beauty), coming every little while upon a
weather-blackened old shepherd and his flock (their
conversation the shepherds' is delightful), or on
some little seaward-plunging valley, holding in its
green hollow a diminutive agricultural village, cur-
tained round from the sea winds by a dense circular
stockade of trees. So you may go southward or north-
ward without impediment to Havre or to Dieppe.

HENRY JAMES, JR.
August 26, 1876

207

APPENDIX

DOCUMENTS RELATING TO HENRY JAMES'S ASSOCIATION
WITH THE NEW YORK "TRIBUNE" INCLUDING HIS COR-
RESPONDENCE WITH WHITELAW REID

The James-Reid correspondence used in this volume
is to be found in the archives of the Tribune (now the
New York Her<dld Tribwie) where it is filed in Letter
Books chronologically arranged. Reid's letters are exact
reproductions made by a process which transferred the
original script to sheets of a tissue-like paper. Owing
to the smallness of the handwriting, the kind of paper
used for duplicating, and the blurring caused by the
process itself, Reid's letters are not entirely legible.
James's letters are holograph and may be read without
difficulty. Other pieces of correspondence have been
included here to provide a complete documentary pic-
ture. With the exception of the very first letter in the
sequence, which is taken from Royal Cortissoz, The
Life of Whitelaw Reid (New York, 1921), the items
have been copied from the Tribune Letter Books.

[JOHN* HAY TO WHITELAW REID, JULY 24i, 1875.]

Henry James, Jr., wants to write for the Tribiwe,
letters from Paris, where he is going to live for some

209

Parisian Sketches

time to come. He considers the Tribune the only paper
where business could be combined with literary ambi-
tion. I hope you will engage him instead of Houssaye.
He will write better letters than anybody you know
his wonderful style and keen observation of life and
character. He has no hesitation in saying that he can
beat Houssaye on his own ground, gossip and chronicle,
and I agree with him. Besides, his name is almost, if not
quite, equally valuable and far more regarded by
cultivated people. He would cost not more than half
what Houssaye costs (counting translation) and I think
his letters would be about twice as good. He would not
interfere with Huntington but would simply take Hous-
saye's place and in my opinion fill it much better.

He will start in the autumn some time. You might let
Houssaye run on until James gets there and then dis-
charge him with a Grantish letter telling him how de-
lighted you and the public have been with his letters,
but that the labor of translation has been very difficult
and now has become almost impossible through the re-
moval from New York of the invaluable roster who
did it, etc., etc.

In short, this is the statement. You pay Houssaye
$30 for a not very good letter and me, Heaven knows
how much for translating it. For, say, $20 or $25
James will write you a much better letter and sign his
name to it.

His address is 20 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass. You
can write to him or to me.

-210

Appendix

[WHITELAW REID TO JOHN HAY^ JULY 27, 1875.]

My dear Hay:

I agree with you about Houssaye more fully prob-
ably than you expected. My plan about him, as I think
I mentioned to you [word illegible] , was to let him run
on 5 or 6 weeks and then, unless he [wore?] well, look
up some other novelty. Only the other day we were
saying that it was [now?] enough to keep up Hous-
saye, like John Paul and other light matter, through
the summer, but that in the autumn or winter we should
have to make a change.

I think exceedingly well of Henry James, though in
view of Huntington I doubt whether it is desirable to
pay him more than $20 a letter. [We? He?] should
want to use his signature, I think [or?] his initial and
identify them at the [end?].

If you like pray go ahead and make the bargain
with him. I should not, however, make it for any fixed
length of time. The [Tribune constituency?] loves a
change now and then except in the case of a few men
like Smalley who are perennial favorites. . . .

Faithfully yours,
WHITELAW REID

211

Parisian Sketches

[MEMORANDUM BY WHITELAW REID, AUGUST 11, 1875.]

Henry James Jr. is engaged to do Paris letters in
place of Houssaye at $20 gold, per letter, to begin
about 25th October, 1875.

W. R

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAT? REID, FROM PARIS, 29 RUE DE
LUXEMBOURG, NOVEMBER 22, 1875.]

My dear Sir :

I enclose herewith my first attempt at a letter to the
Tribune. I hope it will pass muster. I have been here
but a few days and feel by no means au courant or
wound up to the writing pitch. This is a thing which
will have to come little by little ; the lapse of time will
help me more and more to do as I desire. Meanwhile I
will do what I can. I have unfortunately had no Tribune
at hand, and have not been able to take a very accurate
measure of my copy. I am afraid there will be rather
too much than too little. I hope, however, that there
will be about just enough. Let me also hope that any
heading prefixed to the letter will be as brief and sim-
ple as possible. The above is my permanent address. I
beg you, if Mr. Hay is in New York, to commend me
very kindly to him.

Yours very truly
HENRY JAMES JR.

212

Appendix

[EXCERPT FROM A LETTER FROM WHITELAW REID TO GEORGE
W. SMALLEY, LONDON CORRESPONDENT OF THE "TRIBUNE" AND
CONTINENTAL CHIEF OF "TRIBUNE" CORRESPONDENTS, JANU-
ARY 15, 1876.]

Probably your inquiry about Paris correspondence
may need a word of explanation. My understanding
was that you were to undertake to furnish a good
weekly letter from Paris, securing some correspondent
who was satisfactory both to you and ourselves, and
any arrangement we might make with Henry James
would be wholly outside of that. The regular Paris
correspondent [would?] deal with politics, news, [what-
soever?] may be appropriate. James's letters would be,
like Houssaye's, things apart. The same with Trollope.
We may or may not continue him, but he is, of course,
outside the arrangement made with you. . . .

[WHITELAW REID TO HENRY JAMES, MARCH 27, 1876.]

Dear Sir:

I have yours of the llth inst. enclosing your tenth
letter to the Tribune and asking payment for that
number. Our representative in London, Mr. Geo. W.
Smalley, 15 Pall Mall, will on receipt of this forward
you the amount.

I assume that your plans are not likely to take you
much away from Paris for some months to come. If I

213

Parisian Sketches

am wrong in this I should be glad to be advised early.
Some applications have been made for Parisian corre-
spondence, which we have denied at once, preparing to
have the benefit of your services as long as we can.

The letters have not made much [talk?] in the news-
papers, but I think they have given a great deal of
satisfaction to a large majority of our readers. Hous-
saye continues to work a little and is anxious to have
[say?] a letter a month.

You will be sorry to hear that [John Hay?] is not
quite so well as usual, and in consequence is not giving
us as much work as we would like. His wife [several
words illegible] this week, but returns within a few
days. I fancy that their European trip for this sum-
mer is practically abandoned, although they have
hardly brought themselves to admit it yet.

Very truly yours,
WHITELAW REED

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID,, 29 RUE DE LUXEMBOURG,
PARIS, APRIL 11, 1876.]

My dear Sir:

I receive your letter just as I am about to enclose
another missive to the Tribune. Many thanks for the
order upon Mr. Smalley, which I will today forward
to him.

I am glad you have reason to believe that my letters
are pleasing to most of your readers that they could

214 '

Appendix

find an echo in the other papers I never expected. I
am quite contented with such publicity as the Tribune
gives them. I am likely (from present appearances)
to he in Paris for an indefinite period to come. I shall
go away for the summer (after July 1) but I shall re-
main in France, and be able to write, I hope, two or
three times a month. In the autumn I shall almost to a
certainty be back here for next winter. You may there-
fore continue to count upon me.

Many thanks for your news about Hay, which I am
sorry is not better. I hope strongly that his bad health
is a very temporary annoyance. Will you give him
(and to Mrs. Hay) my kind regards and the assurance
of my sympathy? I regret that I am not to have the
pleasure of seeing them this summer.

Yours very truly
HENRY JAMES JR.

[ HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID> PARIS, 29 RUE DE LUXEM-
BOURG, APRIL 23^ 1876.]

My dear Mr. Reid:

I enclose another a 14th letter. Let me add a most
earnest and urgent request that the practice of insert-
ing headings to the successive paragraphs in my let-
ters, which I see was begun on April 1 last, be not con-
tinued. I object to it in the strongest possible manner
and I entreat and beseech you to cause it to be sup-

' 215*

Parisian Sketches

pressed. May I not safely count on your doing so? The
thing is in every way disagreeable to me.

Yours very truly
HENRY JAMES JR.

Memorandum written on the back of the preceding
letter to Whitelaw Reid by a member of his staff. (The
James dispatch referred to is that of April 1, 1876,
"Parisian Topics.")

The letter of April 1, being a very long one, Mr. Ford
put crossheads in it. We have not used them since, and
will not unless you say so especially.

O'Dwyer.

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, ETRETAT, JULY 25, 1876.]

My dear Mr, Reid :

I send the Tribune another letter, after a longer in-
terval than usual, occasioned by a dearth of topics dur-
ing the last two or three weeks of my stay in Paris. I
am here at a curious little sea-bathing place, to which,
a few days hence, I will devote a letter. I must leave
your people the responsibility of baptising the one I
enclose. It is chiefly about Rouen.

I applied to Mr. Smalley some days ago for pay-
ment for the letters I had sent you (with the exception
of one, the 19th ) since the receipt of the check you

216

Appendix

authorized him to send me for eight letters, though,
as he said, the proceeding was irregular, he not being
authorized afresh. The next time I will apply to you
directly.

I should like to propose you on this point an aug-
mentation; viz.: that, beginning with the letter I en-
close, I receive thirty dollars per letter. Will you be
so good as to let me know whether this is agreeable to

you?

Very truly yours
HENRY JAMES JB.

[WHITELAW REID TO HENRY JAMES, AUGUST 10, 1876.]

Dear Mr. James :

I am in receipt of your favor of the 25th July sug-
gesting an advance of one-half the payment for your
letters.

I have been on the point of writing you making a sug-
gestion of a quite different nature. It was to the effect
that the letters should be made rather more "newsy"
in character, and somewhat shorter, and that they
should be sent somewhat less frequently. The reason [is
that we are?] approaching the most interesting period
of the Centennial Exhibition, and are just entering
the active part of the Presidential campaign. At this
time we have less room for foreign matters, and find
less interest among our readers for what foreign corre-
spondence we do get room to print.

817

Parisian Sketches

In addition to this we have feared that your letters
were sometimes on topics too remote from popular
interests to please more than a select few of our
readers. The Tribune constituency is undoubtedly the
most intelligent one possessed by any of the widely
circulated newspapers, but it is certainly possible to
overestimate its literary culture and interest in the
[pure?] literary treatment of a subject. We must not
forget that the people who read newspapers are often
hurried and nearly always [we find?] that they like
brevity, variety, and topics of wide interest that they
are much more likely to read a one-column letter than
one of two columns, and that even when the limit is
fixed at a column it is best, as the candid churchgoer
said to his parson, to err on the side of mercy.

If you can adopt this suggestion, I think you will
agree with me that there would then be less occasion
for a change in the rate of payment.

You must not imagine that any of us have failed to
appreciate the admirable work you have done for us.
The difficulty has sometimes been not that it was too
good, but that it was magazine rather than newspaper
work.

Very truly yours,
WHITEI.AW REED

218

Appendix

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, CHATEAU DE VARENNES
(NEAR MONTARGIS), AUGUST 30, 1876.]

Dear Mr. Reid :

I have just received your letter of August 10th. I
quite appreciate what you say about the character of
my letters, and about their not being the right sort of
thing for a newspaper. I have been half expecting to
hear from you to that effect. I myself had wondered
whether you could make room for them during the
present and coming time at home, and I can easily
imagine that the general reader should feel indisposed
to give the time requisite for reading them. They would,
as you say, be more in place in a magazine. But I am
afraid I can't assent to your proposal that I should try
and write otherwise. I know the sort of letter you mean
it is doubtless the proper sort of thing for the
Tribune to have. But I can't produce it I don't know
how and I couldn't learn how. It would cost me really
more trouble than to write as I have been doing (which
comes tolerably easy to me) and it would be poor econ-
omy for me to try and become "newsy" and gossipy. I
am too finical a writer and I should be constantly be-
coming more "literary" than is desirable. To resist this
tendency would be rowing upstream and would take
much time and pains. If my letters have been "too
good" I am honestly afraid that they are the poorest I
can do, especially for the money ! I had better, there-

219

Parisian Sketches

fore, suspend them altogether, I have enjoyed writing
them,, however, and if the Tribune has not been the
better for them I hope it has not been too much the
worse. I shall doubtless have sooner or later a discreet
successor. Believe me, with the best wishes,

Yours very truly
HENRY JAMES JR.

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, 3 BOLTON STREET, PICCA-
DILLY, DECEMBER 21, 1876.]

My dear Mr. Reid :

I have just received your draft upon Paris for three
hundred francs, for which I am much obliged and which
it has been no inconvenience to wait for.

I have transferred myself, you will see by my date,
to London, whence I sometimes wish there were an oc-
casional pretext for writing to the Tribune. But with
Mr. Smalley here there of course can be none whatever.
I have seen him and he has been very kind to me.

Yours very truly
HENRY JAMES JR.

[MEMORANDUM ON BACK OF PRECEDING LETTER.]

Whitelaw Reid to his secretary: Miss Hutchinson:
Do you think he can do a clever piece of work for us
now and then? W. R.

Appendix

Reply: Mr. Reid: I don't know how to form a judg-
ment about this. Excuse me. M. H.

[WHITELAW REID TO HENRY JAMES, JANUARY 16, 1877,]

Dear Mr. James :

I wish I saw how I could avail myself of the infor-
mation contained in your pleasant note of 21st De-
cember, by asking you for a hand on letters now and
then on some particular point. The truth is, however,
that our Mr. Smalley covers the field fully and fur-
nishes so much copy that we find it pretty hard to
make room for our other correspondence.

Still don't forget the Tribune if you have a chance
to do something in our line.

I have ventured to [become?] a little personal about
your movements, which I hope will not [touch?] too
far upon your private life, or seem disagreeable.

Very truly yours,
WHITELAW REED

[HENTRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, 3 BOLTON STREET^ PICCA-
DILLY, W. 5 FEBRUARY 2, 1877.]

My dear Mr. Reid :

Your note of January 16th came to me a couple of
days since. My allusion to occasionally sending you
something from London was merely pro forma; I know
too well how little, both in quantity and quality, in the

221

Parisian Sketches

way of correspondence Mr. Smalley leaves to be de-
sired. I am very well occupied and shall probably not
soon (in London, at least) feel justified in sending you
anything save my good wishes. I have not seen the
paragraph (personal) to which you allude ; but I think
I can rest in the confidence that it does me no undue
violence.

Yours very truly
H. JAMES JR.

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, NEW YORK, 115 EAST

25TH ST., SUNDAY P.M. [18 DECEMBER 1881?]]

Dear Mr. Reid:

I have delayed writing to you till this evening in
answer to your friendly note, in order that I might he
a little more clear in mind as to the number of days to
which my present stay in New York is to extend. I
hope very much my delay has not brought you incon-
venience especially as I am obliged to say to you that
I am. afraid I shall be leaving town (for Christmas) too
soon to have the pleasure of dining with you. My pres-
ent plan is to go on Thursday next to Cambridge, to
spend the festival just mentioned, at my father's,
and remain there for several days. How long I shall
be in New York on my return (as I am going to
Washington) I don't know as yet; but if it should
be for an appreciable time it will give me great pleas-
ure to let you know, and name a day, as you pro-

Appendix

pose. I don't propose one before that, as I am dining
out continuously until Thursday evening inclusive
and am very sorry to be able just now to do so little
honour to your hospitality. But I shall not fail later,
if the occasion comes. Meanwhile I send kind regards
to Mrs. Reid, and remain with many thanks very truly
yours

H. JAMES

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, 20 QUISTCY STREET, CAM-
BRIDGE, MASS., DEC. 26TH [1881].]

Dear Mr. Reid:

I am sure, just now, of being in New York only on
Saturday and Sunday next or I should perhaps say
of being there disengaged, for I return thither from
this place on Wednesday. On Saturday or Sunday I
shall be very happy to dine with you, and if you will
send me a word (to 115 East 25th St.) saying which
of these days (if either is open to you) you prefer, I
will hold the engagement sacred. I am not to be at
Godkins (who has gone, till Monday next, to Cincin-
nati) but don't know at what hotel I shall be able to
lodge. I owe you as usual an apology for delay
caused also as usual by my uncertainty from day to
day as to my comings, goings, and stayings. With all
the good wishes of the season to yourself and Mrs. Reid,
believe me very truly yours

H. JAMES

Parisian Sketches

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, NEW YORK, 115 EAST

25TH STREET, DECEMBER 29, 1881.]

Dear Mr. Reid:

I this moment find your note, and will with pleasure
present myself on Saturday at seven. With kind re-
gards,

Very truly yours
H. JAMES

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, BOSTON, 131 MT. VERNON
ST., JULY 22, 1883.]

Dear Mr. Reid:

I wonder if it would be in your power to direct a
slight service to be performed for my advantage? If
this is the case I shall be very grateful.

Several years ago in the winter, spring, and sum-
mer of 1876 I wrote from Paris certain letters some
dozen in all, I suppose, to the Tribune. The question
has come up of my collecting into a volume various
sketches of travel that I have produced during the last
ten years; and it occurs to me that in this collection
portions of those letters may be adapted to figure. But
I haven't the articles themselves they are buried, so
far as I have kept them, in the interstices of a heap of
luggage that I have stowed away in Europe. Might

884 '

Appendix

this appeal to you have the result of supplying the
void? In other words, are the back numbers of the
Tribune, as far back as 1876, preserved at the office,
and would it be in your power to ask one of your myr-
midons to search among them for those that contain
my letters? I don't want all of them, but as I am un-
able to specify, it would be well, I am afraid, that all
of them should, if possible, be sent. They are comprised
within the said year 1876, and are in almost all cases,
I think, surmounted with my name. For any trouble
connected with this undertaking I should be much your
debtor, even if it should not prove wholly fruitful. I
have been in America these seven months, but only a
few days in New York or I should have seen you. I have
been detained in this place, and am still detained by
family aff airs. I beg to be kindly recalled to Mrs. Reid,
and am very truly yours

HENRY JAMES

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, BOSTON, MOUNT VERNON
ST., JULY 27, 1883.]

Dear Mr. Reid:

I thank you kindly for your note of the 24th in re-
gard to my old letters in the Tribune and for the in-
formation you caused to be collected for me on the sub-
ject. This information is valuable and helps to solve
my difficulty. You are so good as to say that it would

Parisian Sketches

be in your power to have such of the letters as I should
wish, copied for me in the office. I shall take the liberty
of profiting by this offer and asking you to please di-
rect three of them to be transcribed the only ones I
desire. When the copies are sent me, be so good as to
order that a note of the cost be sent with them that I
may transmit to the office the sum. I subjoin the three
dates and remain

Very truly yours
HENRY JAMES

Tribune, 1876: April 29, August 12, 26.

To the copyist. Please leave a considerable margin.

[HENRY JAMES TO WHITELAW REID, NEWPORT, R. i., AUGUST
8, 1883.]

Dear Mr. Reid :

Your note of the 1st was last night forwarded to me
from Boston, having been kept there for some days,
with many other letters, while I was moving from one
place to another. It was accompanied by the three let-
ters from the Tribivne, in the original text and most
neatly and conveniently arranged. I thank you ex-
tremely for the attention you have given to my request,
and I am especially indebted to the ingenious young
Drury, whose researches were so brilliantly conducted.
Will you please cause him to be assured of my thanks
and direct that the enclosed note ($5.00) be delivered

226

Appendix

to him for his trouble in looking up the papers? I hope
you are not personally in New York, in this fine sum-
mer weather, as much as you are officially.

Very faithfully yours
HENRY JAMES

NOTES

LETTER 1

1 Marie Celine Chaumont (1848(?)-1926) began her stage
career at eleven at the Theatre Moliere. She appeared first in
comedies , playing the child's role in L'Ami des Femmes by
Dumas fils in 1864 at the Gymnase. In 1869 she gave tip
comedy for operetta at the Bouffes-Parisiens.

2 The old Paris Opera had been destroyed by fire. The new
building the one seen by visitors to Paris today was opened
on January 5, 1865. Its architect, Jean-Joseph Garnier (also
designer of the casino of Monte Carlo), had labored for four-
teen years on the edifice.

s James is referring to the panic of 1873, precipitated by
the failure of Jay Cooke, financier of the Northern Pacific
Railroad. It lasted five years and brought drastic mercantile
losses.

4 During 1871-1875, the steps leading toward the adoption
of constitutional laws establishing the form of republican gov-
ernment in France were of extreme national and international
importance, for they determined the future of modern France.
The Third Republic (which lasted until the German invasion
of France in World War II) had been officially proclaimed
in 1870, following the collapse of the government of Napo-
leon III. For several years it had functioned without a con-
stitution, but now the groundwork for permanent government
was being laid.

5 Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895), natural son of Ale-
xandre Dumas p&re (1803-1870), achieved fame with La
Dame aux Camillas (1852), one of the great stage successes
of the second half of the nineteenth century. His subsequent

Parisian Sketches

plays (including L'Etrangere') espoused conventional morality.
The psychological orientation of Dumas' work, reflecting an
unhappy childhood spent in the demimonde atmosphere fre-
quented by his father , was alien to James, who often criti-
cized Dumas' choice of subject matter.

6 The order of the six leading Parisian newspapers in point
of circulation, as estimated in 1858, was: Siecle, Presse, Con-
stitutionnel, Patrie, Debats, and Assemblee. In 1878 the total
number of journals of all kinds published in France was
2,200. Le Figaro had a circulation of about 70,000.

7 Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) came into prominence
about I860, with a succession of satirical comedies. Later he
turned to historical melodramas, many written for Sarah
Bernhardt. He was elected to the French Academy in 1878.
Highly prolific, he was for James a symbol of artistic clever-
ness in the invidious sense of the word. Ferreol was produced
at the Gymnase Theater on December 17, 1875.

8 Ambroise Thomas (18111896). His Hamlet was first
produced at the Opera on March 9, 1868. The title role was
originally cast for a tenor, but the Opera had no one capable
of creating the part. Thomas, accordingly, changed the music
to suit a baritone and Jean-Baptiste Faure (1830-1914)
achieved great renown in the role. Mme. Carvalho (Marie
Miolan), soprano, who played the female lead, was known
for her grace and finish.

9 Luca Giordano (1632-1705) painted the ceiling decora-
tion in the Palazzo Medici.

10 Paul Baudry (1828-1886). His decorations of the Grand
Opera are regarded as his greatest work. The scheme com-
prises thirty-three large separate compositions. In size and
completeness it was the most important decorative enterprise
carried out by one man since the great days of the Renais-
sance.

"Ernesto Rossi (1827-1896) was the first Italian actor
to play Shakespeare's Othello (in 1856) before Paris audi-

* 230

Notes

ences. He was much admired in France and Germany. His
style of acting was never acceptable in England or America
and James's doubts about Rossi's reception in the United
States proved accurate.

12 Fred6ric Lemaitre (1800-1876). His power and bril-
liance were legendary, and his performance in the title role
of Kean was still within memory.

LETTER 2

1 Louis Barye (1796-1875) was exceptionally popular in
America, more so, even, than in France. The Walters Museum
at Baltimore kept a specimen (received from Barye himself)
of every work he produced; the Corcoran Gallery at Wash-
ington had a full collection, and the chief contribution for a
posthumous exhibition and monument to Barye came from
American supporters. James's designation of a liking for
Barye' s work as the sign of "not ... a refined, but at least
an enterprising taste," offended some of Barye's admirers and
a letter protesting James's harsh judgment of the animal
miniatures was published in the Tribune January 22, 1876.
Barye seems to have been a model for James's "cats and mon-
keys" man in "The Madonna of the Future," the vulgar artist
whose "expressive little brutes" were "revolting" in their
"imitative felicity."

2 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875). Carpeaux's group,
"La Danse," created such a furor when first installed in the
Opera house that it was ordered removed. Attempted mu-
tilation of the group by incensed Parisians and the death of
Carpeaux, which followed shortly thereafter, caused a shift
in public opinion out of respect for the sculptor, and the
work was left standing. The objections to it were on the
grounds of its realism. James's description of "poor, lean

Parisian Sketches

individual bodies . . . pitifully real," resembling "the un-
dressed lady and gentleman ... as distinguished from the
unconsciously naked heroes and heroines of Greek art/' re-
veals him to be almost as uncomfortable in the presence of
Carpeaux's figures as the French at first were.

s The Od6on Theater opened originally on May 20, 1797.
It frequently changed its name, being the Theatre de Tlm-
peratrice from 1805-1815, the Theatre Royal under three
kings, the Imperial, under Napoleon III, and today again the
Odeon and the second national theater. The present building
opened in 1819.

4 The bust of Voltaire in the Theatre Fran9ais was by Jean-
Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) ; the pieces on exhibition in the
redecorated Ode'on Theater were by fimile-Auguste Carolus-
Duran (1838-1917); Alexander Schoenewerk (1820-1885);
Henri Chapu (1833-1891); and Albert-Ernest Carrier de
Belleuse who signed himself Carrier (1824-1887).

5 Pauline Virginie Dejazet (1797-1875) first appeared as
a child actress and played in Paris and in the provinces. From
1831 she was chiefly associated with the Palais Royal.

LETTER 3

1 The election of the permanent senators marked the be-
ginning of a republican majority in the chamber. President
MacMahon had been chosen by the monarchical Right; thus
the "victory of the Left" (of the republicans) in the election
was indeed "dramatic." It forced MacMahon to follow a re-
publican policy and to select a ministry from the Left Center.

2 Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), the French critic and his-
torian, became famous with his Revue de I'Instruction Pu-
blique (1855-1856), a series of articles attacking the French
philosophers of the early 19th century and setting forth a

232

Notes

system in which the methods of the exact sciences were ap-
plied to psychological and metaphysical research. In 1864
Taine was made professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, a
position which he held for twenty years. His Histoire de la
Litterature Anglaise, in which his deterministic views were
set forth in uncompromising fashion, appeared in 1863.
Shocked by the French disasters of 1870-1871, he started to
apply his analytical methods to the history of his own coun-
try. The first volume of Les Origines de la France Con-
temporaine, begun in 1871, was therefore eagerly awaited.
James's dismissal of Taine's philosophic ideas is an interest-
ing reflection of his American intellectual orientation. Les
Origines has often been admired for its vigor of style, but
from the French point of view its importance was ideological;
it confronted the public with a criticism of the philosophical
abstractions upon which the men of the eighteenth century
had built their society and which were still widely current.
James had reviewed Taine's work four times previously, in
the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly.

LETTER 4

1 Ernest Meissonier (18151891) won great acclaim the
world over for his early genre paintings, characterized by
their incredible minuteness of detail. Meissonier was extremely
nearsighted and his inability to visualize objects at a dis-
tance probably explains his notable lack of success in large
historical canvases, "1807," which ultimately found a home
at the Metropolitan Museum, is judged by critics as among
the poorest of Meissonier 's efforts in this line.

2 Alexander Stewart (1803-1876) was an American mer-
chant who founded the dry goods business which gradually
became one of the largest mercantile organizations in the
world. He was at one time considered the wealthiest man in

- 288

Parisian Sketches

the United States and attracted much attention by the lavish-
ness of his donations to charitable institutions and his ex-
penditures for objets d'art.

8 Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890) was the English con-
noisseur whose great collection is now housed in Hertford
House, London. During the years 1873-1885 he lived mostly
in Paris.

* James's recollection of the date of the battle of Eylau is
correct: it was fought in the snow on February 8, 1807.

LETTER 5

1 The famous actors named here are : Fra^ois Joseph
Talma (1763-1826) ; Anne Francoise Hippolyte (Mile. Mars)
(1787-1867); Marie Thomas Amelie Delaunay (Mile. Dor-
val) (1798-1849); filisa Felix (Rachel) (1820-1858); and
Antoine Louis Prosper (Frederic Lemaitre) (1800-1876).

2 Rose Cheri (1824-1861) played many parts ir^ the plays
of Augier and Dumas fils, chiefly at the Gymnase. Aimee
Olympe Desclee (18361874) also won fame through Dumas
fls, playing the lead in Frou-Frou. She was particularly good
as the heroine in Fisite de Noces (1871) and La Femme de
Claude (1873). She died suddenly, at the height of her suc-
cess, in 1874. James saw her during his boyhood when the
James family resided for a time in Paris. See James's A
Small Boy and Others (1913), Chapter XXVI.

3 Henry Irving' s production of Macbeth took place at the
Lyceum on September 18, 1875. Charles Kemble (1775-
1854), who first played in Macbeth as Malcolm at seventeen,
was regarded as more suited for poetic drama than for
tragedy, excelling in such roles as Mercutio, Benedick, and
Romeo. Edmund Kean (1787-1833) was noted for his strong
imaginative appeal in parts which had a touch of malign or
murderous frenzy Shylock, lago, Othello, and Macbeth, all

234'

Notes

of which he rendered with a passion verging on extravagance.

4 Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) composed sixty-five op-
erettas in twenty-five years, of which the most popular, dur-
ing the period of James's stay in Paris, were La Vie Parisi-
enne (1866), Barbe Bleue (1866), and La Grande Duchesse
de Gerolstein (1867). Alexandra Lecocq (1832-1918), also
prolific, was most successful with La Fille de Madame Angot
(1873), which was performed 400 nights consecutively.
Among the numerous hits of Herve (Florimond Ronge)
(1825-1892) the most popular was I'Oeuil Creve.

6 In La Cruche Cassee, a comic opera by Noirac and
Moineaux, with music by Vasseur, Celine Chaumont played
the part of Colette.

6 Anna Marie Louise Judic (1849-1911) joined the Bouffes-
Parisiens in 1872 and soon became the leading lady of opera
bouffe* In La Creole, a comic opera with music by Jacques
Offenbach, she played the part of Zoe.

7 James evidently enjoyed Rossi more as Kean than as Mac-
beth. (See Letter 1.)

8 Gustave Hippolyte Worms (18371910) began his career
at the Theatre Fran9ais, where he remained for seven years.
He then went to Russia for ten years and on his return in
1875 was a great success at the Gymnase, fimile Zola shared
James's enthusiasm for Worms, especially admiring his im-
position of realism upon romanticism in his acting technique.

Louis-Arsene Delaunay (1826-1903) was a seasoned
actor, having first appeared at the Odeon in 1846. From, 1848
he had been with the Th6atre Fran9ais.

10 Petite Pluie, a comedy by Edmond Pailleron, was first
produced at the Theatre Fran$ais December 4, 1875.

11 Jeanne Arnould-Plessy (1819-1897) first appeared at
the Th6atre Frangais in 1834 and became a sociStaire within
the year. In 1845 she left Paris to marry J. F. Arnould, a
dramatist, in London. For ten years she played with brilliant
success in St. Petersburg. She returned to the Theatre Fran-

235

Parisian Sketches

9ais in 1855 (as a pensionnaire}. Her farewell performance
took place on May 8, 1876.

"The Varietes was first opened in 1807. The present
building bearing this name is situated at 7, Boulevard Mont-
martre. The original Palais Royal opened in 1831; in 1848
it became the Theatre de Montansier, reverting to the name
of Palais Royal in 1852. It was almost completely rebuilt in
1881.

18 Le Panache was a comedy in three acts by Edmond
Gondinet, first produced at the Palais Royal Theater on Oc-
tober 12, 1875.

14 Les Scandales d'Hier, a comedy in three acts by Theo-
dore Barriere, was first produced at the Vaudeville Theater,
Paris, on November 15, 1875, with Blanche Pierson (1842-
1919) and Pierre Berton (1843-1912) in the cast.

LETTER 6

1 In the first general elections held under the new consti-
tution in February 1876, the Republican party, hitherto united
under the leadership of Gambetta in a common front against
both Royalists and Bonapartists, split into halves. The mod-
erate wing, whose aim was to adopt a political and parlia-
mentary method which consisted in limiting the scope of re-
forms and avoiding disruptive issues, dissociated itself from
the Radicals, the wing that was demanding rapid reforms.
The parties on the right consisted of the Royalists, Legiti-
mates, Orleanists, and the Bonapartists. Throughout the for-
mative period of the parliamentary republic, whenever diverse
issues split public opinion, this cleavage was reflected in a
variety of changed alignments of factions in the multiparty
system. Every ministry had to be a coalition of several groups,
and being based on only a limited area of agreement, tended

236 '

Notes

to be short-lived and to collapse as soon as one or two mar-
ginal elements deserted it.

2 Louis (Joseph) Buffet (1818-1898) was president of the
Assembly, 1872-1875. He was Minister of the Interior and
vice-president of the Council from March 1875 to February
23, 1876,

8 James gained admittance to several coteries in Paris. His
comments on them, therefore, reflect personal experience. He
had been taken by Turgenev to Flaubert's Sunday afternoons,
where he met Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and Edmond de
Goncourt. In other coteries he was meeting Renan and the
French critic, Scherer.

4 James's reference to "Mr. A. and Mr. X." echoes his ex-
clamation to Thomas Sergeant Perry in a letter on February
3, 1876: "You should hear the tone which these gentlemen
take in regard to Cherbuliez and Droz." Gustave Droz, a
minor novelist whom James had reviewed sympathetically in
1871 and still admired, was ridiculed mercilessly by the real-
ists of Flaubert's circle.

5 The Commune was of very recent memory. It had orig-
inated in Paris in 1871. Led by a small but active class of
professional revolutionaries, it was precipitated by a sense
of civic outrage when German troops marched down the
Champs lyse*es and when it became known that the national
assembly had decided to locate in Versailles rather than in
Paris. The uprising, which appealed to the traditions of 1793,
failed, Thiers's government retook the city and the repression
which followed virtually destroyed the revolutionary parties.

6 Marie Edm6 Patrice Maurice de MacMahon (1808-1893).
On the resignation of Thiers in 1873, Marshal MacMahon
was elected president by an almost unanimous vote. His term
of office was set at seven years. The president was more
popular in the rural districts of France than in Paris and
other large cities, where criticism of Republican ideas found
more open expression in the press.

- 237

Parisian Sketches

7 Les Danicheff, a comedy in four acts by Pierre Newsky
(Petr Corvin de Krukovskoi) and Alexandre Dumas fits, was
first produced at the Odeon on January 8, 1876.

8 Ernesto Rossi's Romeo was widely extolled. It was gen-
erally regarded as more suited to his talents than the great
tragic roles, allowing more opportunity for the expression of
his fervor and romanticism.

LETTER 7

1 Victor Hugo (1802-1885), leader of the French Romantic
movement as poet and novelist, first entered political life after
the Revolution of 1848. From the beginning he showed him-
self to be poor in politics, indulging in such bombastic rhetoric
that even his fellows in the House of Peers did not take him
seriously. When he stood for the presidency of the Republic
after 1848, he obtained very few votes. He spent the years
1851-1870 in exile. His re-entry into the political life of his
country during his last years (1870-1885) was more as a
symbol than as an effective agent. He was at the height of
his literary fame, but the idolatry of his worshipers was
counterbalanced by a reaction against his bad qualities his
vulgarity, his intellectual thinness, and his blatant egoism.
Elected to the Senate, as James notes, he nevertheless took
no part in the debates. James had reviewed Hugo's writings
previously in the Nation, reacting so strongly against Hugo's
verbosity that he felt it necessary to admonish himself against
undue severity.

2 La Timbale d" Argent, opera bouffe, words by Jaime and
Noriac, music by Vasseur. Played at the Lyceum Theater
with Mile. Aimee in the lead. La Petite Mariee, comic opera
in three acts by E. Leterrier, music by Lecocq.

8 Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869), poet and politician,
was best known for his Meditations Poetiques (1820), reflec-

288

Notes

live poems of a religious and mystical cast. He took an active
part in the administration and politics of his country, being
for a short time (in 1848) head of the provisional govern-
ment.

4 Marie Favart (Pierette Ignace Pingaud) (1833-1908)
was engaged at the Theatre Frangais, where she became so-
cietaire in 1854.

c Jean Mounet-Sully (1841-1916), tragedian, was engaged
at the Theatre Frangais in 1872, where he won fame in An-
dromaque and Le Cid. He became societaire in 1873. He
played leading roles in I'Etrangere, Hernani, Ruy Bias, An-
tigone, and other classical works.

6 Ernest Legouve (1807-1903) was the French dramatist
who wrote Medee (1855), which gave Ristori a notable part
and which led to Legouve's election to the French Academy.
In middle and late life (he was almost seventy when James
heard him) he devoted his energies largely to lecturing and
propagandizing for women's rights and children's education,
in both of which movements he was a French pioneer. Legouve
was an advocate of physical training, was well known as a
fencer, and was long regarded as one of the best shots in
France.

7 James seems to have had Emerson in mind, among Amer-
ican lecturers, and perhaps his own father, for he heard
Emerson at the Music Hall and Henry James Sr. spoke at
Cooper Union.

8 Francisque Sarcey (18281889), dramatic critic for the
Temps, whose criticism James admired, published a number
of volumes on the contemporary theater. He favored formal
tradition in acting and supremacy of plot in the construction
of stage plays. He was a master of the art of informal lec-
ture. James's estimate of ten minutes' preparation for a lec-
ture probably undercalculates the effort given by Sarcey to
an art form which he developed on the principles of Cicero's

Parisian Sketches

De Oratore. Sarcey discussed the techniques of his lecture
method in Recollections of Middle Life (1893).

9 James adapted this amusing anecdote in his novel, The
American, which he was writing at this time. "What sort of
a husband can you get for twelve thousand francs ?" asks the
little copyist Noemie Nioche of the American,, Christopher
Newman.

10 Isidore Pils (1813-1875). The biographical data for
James's sketch of Pils seem to have been drawn from Becq
de Fouquieres' Isidore Alexandrin Augustin Pils, Sa Fie et
Son Oeuvre, Paris, 1876.

11 Horace Vernet (1758-1836), to whom James compares
Pils, was best known for his Triumph of Paulus Aemilius
(1789), especially for his rendering of the horses in that
painting. Two of his best-known military pictures are "Battle
of Marengo" (1804) and "Morning of Austerlitz" (1808).

12 (Jean) Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864), historical and
portrait painter, was noted for the moral perceptiveness of
his portrait work; Jean Fra^ois Millet (1814-1875) was the
genre painter whose representations of peasant life were
painted with simple, earnest feeling and a comprehension
of its pathos such as few painters have ever attained.

18 Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix (1799-1863) won
his reputation with exhibition of his "Dante and Virgil" in
1822. The early work referred to by James, "Death of
Sardanapalus" is usually dated 1827.

LETTER 8

1 Louis Blanc (1811-1882), publicist and politician, au-
thor of Histoire de la Revolution Frangaise*

2 Desire" Barodet (1823-1906) entered public life in 1870
as an extreme Republican.

240

Notes

3 L6on Gambetta (1838-1882), originally a lawyer, became
famous in 1868 for his defense of the journalist Delescluze,
which he turned into an attack upon the coup d'etat of 1851.
He was first elected to the Assembly in 1869. He rendered
heroic service during the crucial years, 1869-1871, and after
a brief period of strategic retirement in Spain, returned to
France to agitate for the definitive establishment of the Re-
public. His parliamentary dexterity and eloquence secured
the voting of the constitution in February, 1875. To his policy
of moderation he gave the name of "opportunism." His anti-
clericalism was launched to counteract the political intrigues
for the restoration of the temporal power of the Pope.

* James brought to the Catholic University issue a typically
American point of view. The problem was "peculiarly diffi-
cult," as he acknowledged, but it does not appear that James
fully understood how much more difficult such a question was
in a context of European politics than of American. His-
torical evidence shows that as the Royalists came to sponsor
the cause of the Church more actively, the ultramontane cleri-
cals were trusting that restoration of the monarchy would
secure them an influence over policy which was denied them
by the Republicans. The Church was not only competing in
the matter of education, but was trying to make France the
defender of papal interests against the new Italian kingdom
and against Bismarck's Kulturkampf in Germany. The tra-
dition of hostility between Church and republic and the ex-
tent of clerical power in France made protraction of the
strife for two more decades inevitable. James was thinking
both about the ultimate solution of the problem and the im-
mediate politically-involved question.

c "Superior instruction" is one of a number of Gallicisms
to be found in the Tribune letters. James was translating
rinstruction superieure literally. Obviously "higher educa-
tion" would have been more accurate.

841 '

Parisian Sketches

6 James was more intimately acquainted with monarchist
than with radical intemperance. To Alice James, on February
22, 1876, he wrote: "I see none but ardent Monarchists and
hear everything vile said about the Republic." The evening
on which he was in a room into which M. Buffet entered was
either during a visit to the salon of the Marquise de Bloque-
ville or at a reception held by the Due d'Aumale, which he
attended January 25.

7 fimile de Girardin (1802-1881), French publicist, founder
of La Presse and La Liberte. His most successful coup was
the purchase of Le Petit Journal.

8 Georges Lachaud (1846-1896), a Bonapartist, defended
the Empire in Essai sur la Dictature (1875), L'Empire
(1877), and other writings.

9 Fran9ois Jules Edmond Got (1882-1901) entered the
Conservatoire in 1841 and gained first prize for comedy in
1843. He appeared at the Theatre Fran$ais in 1844 and be-
came societaire in 1850. He retired in 1895. The play in
which James saw Got, Maitre Patelin f was an adaptation of
the 15th century farce by Roger Allard.

LETTER. 9

1 The exact occasion of this discussion is revealed in an
unpublished letter to Alice James, February 22: "I went for
an hour to Flaubert's . . . they were talking about the great
theatrical event, Alexandre Dumas' L*trangere , . . they all
detest Dumas very properly, and predict for him a great
fiasco before long."

2 Sarah Bernhardt (Sarah Henriette Rosine) (1845-1923)
began her training for the stage at thirteen, and in 1862 made
her first appearance at the Theatre Fra^ais. In 1872, at the
Fran9ais, she triumphed in King Lear and Ruy Bias, and

QJ&

Notes

shortly thereafter in Hernani, She set out on her travels,
making her first appearance in London in 1879 in Phedre
and in New York in 1880 in Adrienne Lecouvreur. James's
designation of her as "that very interesting actress" is notable
for its lack of enthusiasm. He was always critical of her as
being an excessively histrionic personality.

3 Benoit Constant Coquelin (1841-1909) entered the Thea-
tre Fran9ais in I860, becoming societaire in 1864. He re-
mained with the Fran9ais until 1886, shortly before begin-
ning a tour of Europe and America. James, who had been a
schoolmate of his at Boulogne-sur-Mer in the late 1850's, de-
voted an article to him in the Century Magazine, It was
Coquelin who created the part of Cyrano de Bergerac in
Rostand's poetic drama. He was one of the actors in France
most admired by the novelist.

* Sophie Alexandrine Croizette (1848-1901) was born in
Russia. She entered the Conservatoire in 1867, studied under
Bressant, and won first prize for comedy in 1869. She ap-
peared at the Theatre Fran9ais in 1870 and was elected
societaire in 1873.

B Alexandre-Fr6deric Febvre (1835-1916) played in sev-
eral Paris theaters before joining the Theatre Fran9ais in
1866. He became societaire in 1867 and retired in 1894.

6 Marie Camargo (1710-1770) was the great French bal-
lerina for whom Lecocq wrote the opera Camargo and for
whom Petipa staged a ballet, Camargo (1872), to music by
Minkus. Carlotta Grisi (1821-1899), famous Italian ballerina
of the Romantic period, was the creator of the role of Giselle.

LETTER 10

l John Lemoinne (1815-1892). Besides his writings for
various journals (Journal des Debate, Le Matin) , Lemoinne
wrote many critical studies.

243

Parisian Sketches

2 Jules Janin (1804-1874), novelist, critic, and journalist,
made his chief bid for fame with his collected dramatic criti-
cism from the Journal des Debats (1858), under the title,
"Histoire de la Litterature Dramatique." He was called in
his time "the prince of critics," hut James's charge of super-
ficiality has also found its way into the annals : "II ne man-
quait pas d'esprit, et il avait parfois de la delicatesse, de la
grace; mats, en revanche, on ne trouve chess lui aucun principe,
ni meme aucune suite" (Larousse du XX. Siecle^).

a The extent to which the French Academy has represented
the best literary life is an often-debated question. In the nine-
teenth century, for example, considerations of various kinds
excluded such notables as Proudhon, Comte, B Granger, Sten-
dhal, Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, Zola, the brothers Goncourt,
Maupassant, Daudet, and even such academic writers as
Thierry, Michelet, and Quinet.

4 When James accepted the contract to write the Tribune
letters, he requested that "any heading prefixed to the letter
will be as brief and simple as possible." He said nothing
about the use of subheadings for sections of letters, but his
aversion to these was equally strong. The practice of break-
ing James's text with subheads was first begun in this letter.
On April 23 James wrote to Whitelaw Reid ". . . a most
earnest and urgent request that the practice ... be not con-
tinued. I object to it in the strongest possible manner and I
entreat and beseech you to cause it to be suppressed. . . /'
His dislike of headlines and large type finds frequent expres-
sion in his fiction.

5 The image of "the cracked vessel and the sound" was to
figure in The Portrait of a Lady and to be of the essence in
The Golden BowL

*Jean Leon G6rome (1824-1904), history and genre
painter, was the pupil of Paul Delaroche and Charles Gleyre.
After studying in Italy, he visited Russia and Egypt in search

.'844-

Notes

of new subjects. His range was wide and included many in-
terpretations of ancient history and myth,, as well as con-
temporary themes.

7 Albert Delpit (1849-1893) was a French playwright,
American by birth, whose second drama was the one James
saw and described so amusingly. It had been originally per-
formed at the Theatre Historique in 1873. The play aroused
among French critics the same mockery to be found in James's
precis some suggested that Lincoln would never have be-
come known had it not been for his dramatic assassination.
Delpit wrote prolifically, as journalist, novelist, poet, and
playwright.

8 Victor Tissot (184*5-1917) was a Swiss, educated in
Tuebingen and Vienna. He came to Paris in 1867 and estab-
lished himself as a journalist. Following a visit to Germany,
he wrote the two books mentioned by James which became
instantaneous best sellers, both expressions (as James accu-
rately puts it) of 'Teutophobia" : Voyage au Pays des Mil-
liards (1875) and Les Prussians en Allemagne (1876).

9 The "gentleman of Germanic sympathies" of whom James
spoke was probably Baron Holstein, secretary of the German
Embassy, with whom James dined on a number of occasions
during his winter in Paris and whom he described in a letter
home as "one of the most acute and intelligent men I have
ever met."

LETTER 11

1 Alexandre Gabriel Decamps (1803-1860), landscape and
genre painter, became one of the leaders of the modern
French Eomantic school. In 1827, traveling to Greece, Con^
stantinople, and Asia Minor, he formed a lasting predilection
for oriental subj ects, which he treated with consummate power
and skill. The directions taken by the evolution of modern

245

Parisian Sketches

painting have resulted in an undervaluing of Decamps' tech-
nical mastery, the subjects through which he expressed him-
self no longer arousing wide artistic interest.

2 Pierre-fitienne Rousseau (1812-1867), founder of the
modern French school of landscape painting, was noted espe-
cially for his ability to render atmospheric effects.

3 Prosper-Georges-Antoine Marilhat (1811-1847) traveled
in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, finding his subjects in the
caravans and oases of the desert and in the streets of oriental
villages. In Cairo, he painted portraits, notably that of Me-
hemet-Ali. He had achieved great fame by the time of his
premature death.

4 The problem of the Khedive shares was much in the head-
lines at this time. The Khedive, Ismail Pasha, a semi-inde-
pendent ruler in Egypt, had been fantastically reckless in his
personal and state expenses, and in thirteen years had in-
creased the national debt from about 3,000,000 to 100,-
000,000. Most of his money had been derived from bonds sold
chiefly to French and English investors. He replaced his Eng-
lish adviser, Charles Gordon, by an incapable Egyptian, and
both the Sudan and Egypt were rapidly going bankrupt. In
1876 the Khedive suspended payment of debts and France
insisted on a commission which would receive directly a part
of the national income for the benefit of bondholders without
going through the hands of corrupt officials. The British even-
tually joined the French in this commission.

5 Jacques Raymond Brascassat (1804-1867) preceded Rosa
Bonheur (18221899) in reviving the painting of animals, to
which he devoted himself almost exclusively after 1831. He
became a vogue with rich collectors but was never so well
known as Rosa Bonheur, whose fame was so great that dur-
ing the Franco-Prussian War her studio and residence were
respected by special order of the Crown Prince of Prussia.

Paul Potter (1625-1654), early Dutch animal painter,

246

Notes

was noted for the accuracy and objectivity of his paintings
of horses and cattle.

7 Ernest Baillet was the pupil of Saunier rather than
Breton. He was born in Brest. He exhibited in salons from
1877 to 1897, painting mostly the landscapes and peasants
of Brittany.

8 Jean Boldini (1842-1931), an artist who began his study
in Florence and who settled in Paris around 1872, was at this
time beginning a notable career. Most of his honors (two
grand prizes at the International Expositions of 1889 and
1900, and the Legion of Honor) still lay before him. He was
primarily a portrait painter, whose work is distinguished for
the feeling of intensity of life created in his characters.

9 Any book by Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was an event of
the first literary importance on the Parisian scene. Renan had
won the Prix Volney in 1847 (at the age of twenty- four)
for his general history of Semitic languages. In the years
following he undertook the study of the relation of the intel-
lectual elite to democracy, becoming the philosopher to articu-
late most successfully the ideal of the intellectual life. From
1857 to 1859 he published the essays which won him renown
as a stylist. In 1860 he went on a mission to Phoenicia and
Syria, out of which came his various biblical studies. The
Franco-Prussian War revived his interest in French political
problems, but his work of the 1870's was marred, as James
notes, by disillusionment and excessive irony.

10 The salon of Marie de Flavigny, Countess d'Agoult
(1805-1876), had been the rendezvous of the celebrities of
her time* Her liaison with Franz Liszt was notorious. She
wrote historical and philosophical works, expressing her ideas
with forthrightness and energy.

"Louise Revoil Colet (1810-1876) wrote chiefly poetry,
but was better known for her beauty and her amours with
Cousin, Villemain, Musset, and, above all, Flaubert. Lui, her

Parisian Sketches

novel about Musset, was published in 1859. George Sand's
Lui et Elle came out in the same year.

LETTER 12

1 This letter was revised by James and reprinted in Por-
traits of Places, 1883.

2 General Marceau of the First Republic was Fra^ois Mar-
ceau Desgraviers (1769-1796),

LETTER 13

1 "Cham" was the pseudonym of Am6d6e de No (1819-
1879), prolific and spirited cartoonist. He published a num-
ber of albums in which the history of the ideas, manners,
politics, art, and literature of the preceding era were ren-
dered "avec une legere myopie conservatrice."

Honore Daumier (1808-1879), the greatest of all French
caricaturists, raised this medium to the level of art.

2 The second exhibition of the Impressionists comprised 252
paintings, pastels, water colors, drawings, and etchings by
20 exhibitors. Degas was represented by 24) works; Monet
18; Berthe Morisot 17, and Renoir 15. The French press was
violent in its denunciation of the exhibit. Albert Wolff of Le
Figaro said: "It is a frightening spectacle of human vanity
gone astray to the point of madness."

The enlightened patronage of Durand-Ruel, who supplied
moral as well as financial support, resulted in most of the Im-
pressionists' shunning the Salon, from which they would
doubtless have been rejected in any case. Public disapproval
of their art usually took the form (as with James) of finding
their subjects "ugly," but the actual basis of Impressionist

848

Notes

experimentation was, in reality, essentially technical: they
were interested in the study of light, using a commalike brush
stroke to create more of nature the sunny air, the character
of the hour, etc. Zola, interestingly enough, called them natu-
ralists for this reason. The definition given by one of Renoir's
friends at this time, "treating a subject in terms of its tone
and not; of the subject itself," perhaps best describes their
purposes.

It is interesting that James, who himself came to be in-
creasingly absorbed by "tone" (in so far as this is represented
in fiction through isolation of point of view), should have
failed to grasp the relationship between the subject matter
of the Impressionists and their manner of rendering it. He
did eventually, however, make his peace with the "intransi-
gents." In a notable passage in The American Scene, describ-
ing a visit in 19045 to a Connecticut house hung with "won-
drous examples of Manet, Degas, of Claude Monet, of Whis-
tler ..." James proclaimed that "no proof of the sovereign
power of art could have been . , . sharper. It made every-
thing else shrivel and fade : it was like the sudden trill of the
nightingale. ..."

3 The opening of Jeanne d'Arc by Auguste Mermet (1810
1889) was on April 5, 1876, and is memorable as the first new
work to be produced in the new Paris Opera House. (Marie)
Gabrielle Krauss (1842-1906) made her debut in Paris at
the Theatre Italien in II Trovatore, April 6, 1867. She ac-
cepted an engagement at the Paris Opera in 1874, where she
made her debut in La Juive in 1875. In time she became as
great an actress as singer; the French called her "La Rachel
Chantant."

4 Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) first won no-
tice as literary critic of Le Globe. A favorable article on
Victor Hugo brought him into close friendship and literary
association with the leader of the French Romantic move-

249. \

Parisian Sketches

ment. In 1828 he published his comprehensive study of the
poets of the Pl&ade, the ancestors of the Romantic poets. He
also published poetry and romantic fiction of his own. In
1837 he went to Switzerland and began his monumental study
of the Jansenist movement. Appointed to the chair of litera-
ture at the University of Liege, in Belgium, he undertook a
study of Chateaubriand which aroused wide controversy. His
various articles dealing with significant contemporary and
earlier writers solidly established him as a literary critic.
These essays were collected under the titles : Critiques et Por-
traits Litteraires, Portraits Litteraires, Portraits Contempo-
rains, Causeries du Lundi, and Nouveaux Lundis.

Sainte-Beuve was a founder of modern literary criticism,
developing a historical approach (set forth as a doctrine in
his article on Chateaubriand in 1862) in which the literary
work must not be considered apart from the writer and in
which careful research into biography is therefore essential.
The various posthumous volumes which were appearing were
collections of Sainte-Beuve's articles for various Parisian
papers.

5 James's attitude toward the "posthumous rummaging" of
table drawers echoes his comments on the publication of Haw-
thorne's notebooks, when he wondered about "the proper lim-
its of curiosity" and observed that artists "will be likely to
take alarm, empty their table-drawers, and level the ap-
proaches to their privacy. The critics, psychologists, and gos-
sip-mongers may then glean amid the stubble."

*mile Zola (1840-1902) was to found the naturalist
school of fiction and to write his Rougon-Macquart series
(1871-1893), a group of twenty novels which traces the
"natural" and social history of a family under the Second
Empire. Although James continued to have reservations about
him, he ultimately came to have great respect for his achieve-
ment. The identification of Zola with Flaubert (1821-1880)
probably resulted from James's meeting Zola in Flaubert's

* 250

Notes

circle. It also reflects the controversy over Madame Bovary
(1856-1857), for which Flaubert had been accused (and ac-
quitted) of immorality. The book was hailed as a masterpiece
of realism. By 1876 Flaubert had published his revised ver-
sions of L'Education Sentimentale and La Tentation de St.
Antoine, but James's reaction to Flaubert was as much in
terms of his realism as of his stylistic innovations.

LETTER 14

1 The artists viewed by James in this review of the Salon
of 1876 were: Paul Gustave Dore (1833-1883), history
painter and designer; Xavier Alphonse Monchablon (1835-
1907), history and portrait painter, winner of the Grand Prix
de Rome in 1863; Jean Baptiste Philippe Emile Bin (1825-
1897), history painter and decorator of public and private
buildings; Paul Joseph Blanc (18461905), genre painter;
Valerico Lacetti (1836-1909), history and genre painter;
Joseph Noel Sylvestre (18471926), history, genre, and por-
trait painter, winner of the Prize of the Salon of 1876; Albert
Aublet (1851-1937(?)); Jean Baptiste fidouard Detaille
(18481912), one of the most popular contemporary paint-
ers; Michel Munkacsy (Michael Lieb) (1844-1909), history,
genre, and portrait painter; and Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848
1884), who had won universal approbation the year previ-
ously for his "Annunciation."

LETTER 15

1 The artists whose works James notes here were: fimile-
Auguste Carolus-Duran (1838-1917), portrait painter and
sculptor; Paul Baudry (1828-1886) (see Letter 1); Alexan-

* 251 *

Parisian Sketches

dre Cabanel (1824-1889), whose reputation had been made
in 1845 with his tableau, "Jesus dans le Pre*toire"; Charles
Chaplin (1825-1891), noted for his charming paintings of
young girls; Edouard Jacquemart (n6e Nelie Andre) (1841
1912), noted for her portraits of leaders in society and
politics, winner of medals at the Salons of 1868, 1869,
and 1870; Alexei Charlamoff (also spelled Harlamoff) (1842-
(?)), product of the Academy of Beaux Arts in Petersburg
and student of Bonnant in Paris; George Clarin (1843
1919), whose portrait of Sarah Bernhardt in this Salon made
a great sensation; Louise Abb6ma (1858-1927), young pupil
of Chaplin and Carolus-Duran, whose portrait of Sarah
Bernhardt also created a tremendous impression at the Salon ;
L6on-Joseph Bonnant (1834-1923), famous for his portraits
of such notables as Hugo, Thiers, Benan, Felix Faure, and
winner of the medal of the Salon of 1869; Antoine Vollon
(18331900), regarded as one of the petits maitres in land-
scape painting and particularly relished by James; William
Adolphe Bouguereau (18251905), one of the most prolific
French painters, whose strenuous schedule of output led to a
superficiality which James found "perverse" ; Jehan Georges
Vibert (18401902), whose specialty was the depiction of
the trivial lapses of the clergy, humorously viewed; Karl-
Pierre Daubigny (18461885), one of the most charming
landscapists of this period; Fran9ois-Louis Fransais (1814-
1897), famous landscapist, whose "Le Miroir de Scey" and
"Portrait of M.B." were shown at this Salon; Joseph Chel-
monski (1850-1914), Russian landscapist, who submitted two
scenes of the Ukraine to this Salon and whom James believed
to have followed the famous Dutch landscapist Salomon van
Ruysdael (1600-1670); Edward Harrison May (1824-1887),
pupil of Huntington in New York and of Couture in Paris ;
Henry Bacon (1839-1912), born in Massachusetts, pupil of
Cabanel and Fr&re; Edgar Melville Ward (1839-1915), born

252 *

Notes

in Ohio, pupil of Cabanel; Frederic Arthur Bridgman (1847-
(?)), from New York, pupil of Gerome; Paul Dubois (1829-
1905), the distinguished sculptor of the 1860's and 1870's,
who won the medal of honor in the Salon of 1867 and whose
figures were admired for their representation of ideal beauty;
and Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), the actress, who had stud-
ied sculpture with Gustave Dore and who won honorable
mention for her work in this exhibit.

LETTER 16

1 Kenan's Dialogues Philosophiques, written in 1871, re-
veals a disenchanted temper, but the struggles of democratic
France for survival roused Renan to take a more affirmative
attitude in later works.

2 Jules Michelet, the historian, died on February 9, 1874.
He was first buried at Hyeres, according to his last wishes
expressed to his wife on his deathbed, but the civil tribunal
of Seine ordered (in August 1875) that his body be exhumed
and given a more appropriate final resting place in Paris. He
was buried in the cemetery d'Est May 17, 1876.

8 Paul-Armand Challemel-Lacour (1827-1896), philosopher
and politician, friend of Gambetta and Prefect of Rhone in
1870.

4 Gabriel Paul d'Haussonville (1843-1924), politician and
prolific writer on social and literary subjects, published in
1875 the life of Sainte-Beuve to which James alludes. He was
elected to the Academy in 1888.

5 Germaine de Stael (1766-1817) was born Anne Louise
Germaine Necker and married a Swedish diplomat, Baron
Stael-Holstein. Her salon and her unconventional love affairs
were famous. Her novel Corinne (1807) was widely read.
Her principal work was De I'Allemagne (1811), which con-

253

Parisian Sketches

tributed to tlie spread of German romanticism. Her opposition
to Napoleon caused her exile from Paris to Switzerland.

6 Sully-Prudhomme (Rene Fra^ois Armand) (1839-1907),
poet. He was elected member of the Academy in 1881 and
won the Nobel Prize in 1901.

7 The Salon of the Refuses, 1876, included the work of those
Impressionists who had submitted paintings to the Salon and
had been rejected. Among these, but unmentioned by James,
was Manet's "Artist, Portrait of Marcellin Desbourtier."

8 James Fair man, Scottish- American landscape painter
(1826-1904), traveled to Europe in 1871 and remained
abroad for ten years but exhibited without success.

LETTER 17

1 Ximenes Doudan (1800-1872) served as secretary to Vic-
tor de Broglie, Minister of Education. The correspondence of
Doudan was published under the title Melanges et Lettres de
Doudan, 1876. James speaks of having "marked a great many
passages for quotation," and the volumes, preserved in Henry
James's library up to the time of its dispersal give proof of
this.

2 The "dark clouds in the East" is a reference to events in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, which led to a new Russo-Turkish
War, 1877-1878.

5 Jean Baptiste Dumas (1800-1884) replaced the historian
Fran9ois Guizot, who died in 1874.

4 At the "feast of vocalism" represented by Verdi's A'ida
and Requiem, James heard: Rosine Stoltz (18151903),
mezzo-soprano; Maria Waldmann (1844-1920), Austrian
mezzo-soprano, who had become famous as Amneris in the
first Italian performance of A'ida and for whom Verdi subse-
quently wrote the mezzo-soprano part in the Requiem; Paolo

254

Notes

Medini (1831-1911), who sang leading roles in such operas
as Norma, Don Carlos, and Higoletto; and Angelo Masini
(1844-1926), the first of the younger tenors of Italy.

6 James had spoken about George Sand that winter with
Turgenev and Flaubert.

LETTER 18

George Sand (Aurore Lucille Dupin) (1804-1876). This
letter was reprinted in French Poets and Novelists, 1878.
James wrote at least seven papers and reviews of the work
of George Sand, the three most important being collected in
Notes on Novelists (1914).

LETTER 19

1 This account of Rouen was revised and reprinted in Por-
traits of Places, 1883.

2 The old center of Rouen was destroyed in World War II,
particularly in 1944 in the battle for the Seine crossings. The
cathedral (1 202-20), which has three very beautiful towers,
an impressive nave, and a choir, transepts, and portals of
great distinction, was severely damaged, especially on the
south side. St. Ouen Church (1318-39), with a fine choir,
escaped any considerable war damage.

8 James incorrectly identifies one of the two cardinals.
George II d'Amboise (1488-1550), nephew of George I
d'Amboise (1460-1510), was attached to the Duke of Orleans,
minister and counselor of Louis XII.

Parisian Sketches

LETTER 20

1 This letter was revised and reprinted in Portraits of
Places, 1883.

2 Alphonse Karr (1808-1890), "celebrity" of fitretat, was
a writer of romantic novels.

3 Offenbach had retired to fitretat after a fabulously suc-
cessful career. James's reference to his "not shaking his legs
and making play with his eyes" refers to the gestures of
performers in his operettas, especially the movements of the
can-can.

4 Mile. X, the actress of the Palais Royal, was probably
Celine Chaumont, to whom James had referred in some of
his earlier letters.

INDEX

Abb&na, Louise, 150, 252
Adams, Henry, xx
Allard, Eoger, 242
Atlantic Monthly, The, 233
Aublet, Albert, 140-41, 251
Aumale, Due d', 242

Bacon, Henry, 155, 252
Baillet, Ernest, 110-11, 247
Balzac, Honor 6 de, xiv
Barodet, Desire, 75, 241
Barriere, Theodore, 236
Barye, Louis, xx, xxvi, 14-19,

231
Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 145

47, 251
Baudry, Paul, 11, 71, 148,

230, 251
Becq de Fouqui&res, Louis,

70, 240
Bernhardt, Sarah, 87, 149-

50, 155-56, 165, 230,

242-43, 252, 253
Berton, Pierre, 53, 236
Bin, Jean Baptiste, 138, 251
Blanc, Joseph, 75, 138-39,

240, 251

Bloqueville, Marquise de, 242
Boldini, Jean, xxi, 111-12,

247

Bonheur, Rosa, 110, 246

Bonnat, Leon-Joseph, 150,
252

Bouguereau, William
Adolphe, 152, 252

Brascassat, Jacques Ray-
mond, 110, 246

Bridgman, Frederic Arthur,
155, 253

Buffet, Louis, 54, 56-57, 58,
77-78, 83, 84, 242

Cabanel, Alexandre, 148, 152,

251-52

Camargo, Marie, 91, 243
Carolus-Duran, Emile-

Auguste, 21, 148, 232,

251
Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, xx,

20-21, 231

Carrier de Belleuse, Albert-
Ernest, 22, 232
Carvalho, Mme. (Marie Mio-

lan), 10, 230
Century Magazine^ 243
Challemel-Lacour, Paul Ar-

mand, 163, 253
"Cham" (Am&lee de No),

128, 248
Chaplin, Charles, xxi, 148,

252

857

Chapu, Henri, 22, 232
Charlamoff, Alexei, 149, 252
Chauinont, Celine, 4, 47, 204,

229, 235, 256
Chelmonski, Joseph, 154-55,

252

Cherbuliez, Victor, 237
Cheri, Rose, 45
Chevaliers de U Patrie, 100-2
Clairin, George, 149, 252
Colet, Louise, 113-14, 247
Commune, the, 57, 237
Cook, Clarence, xxvi
Coquelin, Benoit Constant,

89, 243

Cortissoz, Royal, 209
Creole, La, 46-47, 235
Croizette, Sophie Alexan-
drine, 89, 165
Cruche Ca$$ee,La, 46-47, 235

Danicheff, Les, 58-61, 238
Daubigny, Karl-Pierre, 154,

252

Daudet, Alphonse, xiv, 237
Daumier, Honor, 128, 248
Decamps, Alexandre, xx, xxi,

105, 106-7, 108, 245
D6j azet, Pauline Virginia, 22,

81, 232
Delacroix, Eugene, 72-73,

105, 108, 240
Delaunay, Louis-Arsfcne, 50-

51, 67, 235

Delpit, Albert, 100, 245
Desclee, Aimee Olympe, 45,

234
Detaille, Jean Baptiste, 141

42, 251

Dickens, Charles, x
Dore, Gustave, 137-38, 251
Dorval, Madame (Marie

Thomas Delaunay), 45,

234
Doudan, Xim&nes, 168-74,

254

Droz, Gustave, 237
Dubois, Paul, 155, 175, 253
Dumas, Alexandra, fils, xxiii,

7, 58, 59, 86-91, 97, 176,

181, 229, 230, 237, 238,

242
Dumas, Jean Baptiste, 174,

254
Durand-Ruel Gallery, xix,

131, 167, 248

Emerson, R. W,, xxiii, 239
Qtra,ngere t L', 7, 86-91, 230,
242

F airman, James, 166, 254
Faure, Jean-Baptiste, 10,

133, 230

Favart, Marie, 67, 289
Febvre, Alexandre-Fr^d^ric,,

90, 243
Ferreol, 8, 49-51, 230

Index

Figaro, Le, 8, 230
Flandrin, Jean Hippolyte,

xxi, 240
Flaubert, Gustave, xiv, xv,

135, 152, 237, 242, 247,

250-51, 255
Flavigny, Marie de (Countess

d'Agoult), 113-14, 247
Fouquiferes, Becq de. See

Becq de Fouqui&res
Fran9ais, Fran9ois-Louis,

154, 252
French Academy, 93, 94, 95,

96, 97, 244
Fullerton, W. Morton, xxxv

Galaxy, The, xiv

Gallicisms, 241

Gambetta, L6on, 75-76, 84-

85, 236, 241

Garnier, Jean-Joseph, 229
Garrick, David, 4>6
Ger6me, Jean Leon, 98-99,

106, 108-9, 151-52, 244
Giordano, Luca, 10, 230
Girardin, Emile de, 78-81,

242

Godkin, E. L., 223
Goncourt, Edmond de, xiv,

237

Gondinet, Edmond, 236
Got, Fran9ois Jules Edmond,

82, 242
Greeley, Horace, xi

Grisi, Carlotta, 91, 243
Guizot, Fraiujois, 174, 254

Harlamoff, Alexei. See Char-

lamoff

Harper's Weekly, ix, xxxv
Harvard College, vi
Haussonville, Gabriel Paul d',

163, 253
Hay, John, xii, 209-11, 212,

214, 215
Herve (Florimond Ronge),

46, 235

Holstein, Baron, 245
Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 21,

232

Houghton Library, v
Houssaye, Arsene, xii, xxv

xxvi, 210, 213, 214
Howells, William Dean, xiv,

xv
Hugo, Victor, 64-67, 85, 181,

238, 249
Huntington, William H., xv,

211

Impressionism, xxi-xxii, 131

32, 248-49
Irving, Henry, 46, 47, 234

Jacquemart, Edouard, 149,

252

James, Alice (sister), 242
James, Henry (father), xvi,
222, 239

259

Index

James, Henry, works men-
tioned
The American, xiv, xxii,

240
The American Scene, xxii,

249

"Broken Wings," xxxiii
"The Death of the Lion/'

xxxvii

"The Figure in the Car-
pet/' xxxvii

"French Poets and Novel-
ists, 255

The Golden Bowl, 244
Guy Domville, xxxi-xxxii
"The Madonna of the Fu-
ture/' 231
"The Next Time/' xxxii-

xxxvii

"The Papers/' xxxiii
The Portrait of a Lady,

xxxi, 244
Portraits of Places, xvii,

248, 255, 256

The Reverberator, x, xxxvii
A Small Boy and Others,

234

James, William, xvi, xxx
James, William (nephew), v
Janin, Jules, 93-94, 244
Journal des D&bats, 75, 93,

94, 96, 230, 243, 244
Judic, Anna Marie Louise,

47, 235
Judith, (Mme.), xi

Karr, Alphonse, 200, 256
Kean, Edmund, 11-12, 46,

234

Kemble, Charles, 46, 234
Khedive's shares, 108, 246
Krauss, (Marie) Gabrielle,

133, 249

Laccetti, Valerico, 139, 251
Lachaud, Georges, 80-81,

242
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 67,

238-39

Laugel, Auguste, xv
Lecocq, Alexandre, 46, 235,

238, 243

Legouve", Ernest, 68, 239
Lemaitre, Fr6d6ric, 12, 45,

81-82, 231, 234
Lemoinne, John, 93-98, 243
Leterrier, E., 238
Liszt, Franz von, 114, 247
Literature, ix

MacMahon, Marshal, 57, 232,

237

Maitre Patelin, 82, 242
Marceau, General, 122, 248
Marilhat, Prosper-Georges-

Antoine, 107-8, 246
Mars, Mile. (Anne Fran$oise

Hippolyte), 45, 234
Masini, Angelo, 175, 255
Maupassant, Guy de, xiv, 287

260

Index

May, Edward Harrison, 155, Paris Opera House, 6, 8-10,

252

Medini, Paolo, 175, 255
Meissonier, Ernest, xx, 33-

39, 105, 106, 109-10,

233

M6rime*e, Prosper, 179
Mermet, Auguste, 133, 249
Michelet, Jules, 162-64*, 253
Millet, Jean Fra^ois, xxi,

105, 240
Monehablon, Xavier Al-

phonse, 138, 251
Moreau, Gustave, 152, 153,

175
Mounet-Sully, Jean, 67-68,

239
Munkacsy, Michel, xxi, 142-

45, 251
Musset, Alfred de, 114, 179,

247-48

Nation, The, 233, 238
Newsky, Pierre, 59, 238
New York Tribune. See
Tribune

Ode*on Theater, 21, 232
Offenbach, Jacques, 46, 200-
1, 235, 256

PaiUeron, Edmond, 51, 235
Palais Royal Theater, 236
Panache, Le, 52, 236

229, 249

Paul, John, xv, xxvi, 211
Perry, Thomas Sergeant, 237
Petite Mariee, La, 66, 238
Pierson, Blanche, 53, 236
Pils, Isidore, 70-72, 240
Plessy, Jeanne Arnould-, 51

52, 164-65, 235
PMLA, v

Potter, Paul, 110, 246-47
Presse, La, 230

Rachel (Elisa Felix), xi, 45,

234

Realism, 15, 231, 237, 251
Refuses, 166, 254
Reid, Mrs. Helen Rogers, v
Reid, Whitelaw, xii, xiii, xvi,

xxiv xxxii, xxxiv, 209

27, 244
Renan, Ernest, xv, xix, 113,

157-62, 173, 181-82,

247, 253
Rossi, Ernesto, 11, 46, 47

49, 61-63, 230, 235, 238
Rousseau, Pierre-fitienne,

, 105, 246
Ruskin, John, xxii, 45

Saint e-Beuve, Charles Aa-
gustin, xix, 134-35, 162,
169, 174-86, 249-50

Salon des Refuse's. See
Refuse's

261

Index

Sand, George, xxii, 162, 176-

86, 248, 255

Sarcey, Francisque, 69, 239
Sardou, Victorian, xxiii, 8, 49,

230
Scandales d'Hier, Les, 53,

236

Scherer, Edmond, 237
Schoenewerk, Alexander, 22,

232
Smalley, George W., 211, 213,

214, 216, 220, 221, 222
Stael, Germaine de, 163, 169,

170, 253

Stern, Daniel. See Flavigny
Stewart, A. T., 33, 111, 233
Stoltz, Rosine, 175, 254
Strauss, Johann, xx
Sully-Prudhomme (Rene

Francis Armand), 164-

65, 254

Sweeney, John L., v, xxii
Sylvestre, Joseph Noel, 139

40, 251

Thomas, Ambroise, 10, 230
Timbale d' Argent, 66, 238
Tissot, Victor, 102-3, 245
Tribune, New York, v, ix~

xxxvii (passim), 20927,

244

Trollope, Anthony, 213
Turgenev, Ivan, xiii, xv, 113,

127, 237, 255

Varietes, 236

Verdi, Giuseppe, xx, 174,

175, 254

Vernet, Horace, 240
Vibert, Georges, 153, 252
Vollon, Antoine, xxi, 150-51,

252

Wade, Allan, v
Waldmann, Maria, 175, 254
Wallace, Richard, 34, 234
Ward, Edgar, 155, 252
Worms, Gustave Hippolyte,
50-51, 82, 235

Taine, Hippolyte, 24, 28-32, Yellow "Book, The, xxxiii

232

Talma, Fran9ois Joseph, 44, Zola, fimile, xiv, xix, xxiv,

46, 234 135, 235, 237, 250-51

262

118424